


Turn Left at the Park

by Glenmore



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Depression, Loneliness, M/M, No Mary, a case, suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-15
Updated: 2017-06-01
Packaged: 2018-11-01 02:13:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 28
Words: 37,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10912236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glenmore/pseuds/Glenmore
Summary: So what would have happened if John hadn't walked through the park and met Stamford?What if, instead, he walked around the park and just went home?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mirabile Dictu (Mira)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mira/gifts).



> This story was written after series 2, and posted before series 3. It was taken down a couple of years ago and is reinstated now for the wonderful Mira, who won me in the Fandom Trumps Hate (2017) auction. It can be reinstated because the as-wonderful ancientreader provided the imbecilic author with a full copy because said imbecilic author lost two chapters. No one knows how. I am eternally grateful to ancientreader for keeping a full copy of my work, and for being so supportive. 
> 
> At the end of some chapters, you will find little fractions of chapters. Mostly they are text messages between Sherlock and Molly.

"Nothing ever happens to me."

John Watson, first in his class in anatomy for two years running, has realised his life has come to a complete standstill. He's walking back to the tube after therapy, pondering the insurmountable wall he seems wedged up against these days. His leg hurts, his hand shudders uncontrollably, he can't sleep unless the light is on, he never has a night of unbroken sleep, he can't adjust to civilian life, he is bored to the core. It's going to be like this forever.

Nothing will ever happen to me.

He's crossed the road and about to walk through the park - there might be squirrels, and squirrels always make you feel better - when he spies a soft plump man sitting on a bench in amongst the trees. Other people are walking along the path or chatting in pairs on other benches, enjoying the watery Spring sunshine.

John, horribly self conscious of his leg that jammed shut and will no longer bend without a scatter gun spray of agony, suddenly can't face walking past people who appear as a kind of audience, gawking from the front row as he struggles on a cane. He turns left and walks the long way around to the tube.

The plum man on the bench close to the entrance of the park is the first person John would have had to walk past, if he had turned left. He's soft and spreading in early middle age with a cheerful face and a resigned unhappiness that no one would guess. Not long after John didn't walk past him, this man goes back to his work in the local hospital, checks the slides he's prepared for the afternoon lectures and bids Sherlock, some indefinable scientific deducting genius or certifiable unfeeling loony with a gift for chemistry, depending on who you ask, a cursory goodbye.

Sherlock, to whom things happen regularly & who only a short time earlier was flogging a corpse with a riding crop, doesn't look up from his microscope. He is mesmerised by small pools of blood that spit and shine like tiny stars as they burn in salty solutions.

"Hoo roo," he says sharply with synthetic warmth.

That night Sherlock is consulted on the case of the not exactly suicides. He meets the killer cabbie face to face and humours him for a while, pretending that he too will swallow the fatal pill. He listens to the cabbie's dreary brags and woeful excuse of an aneurysm as he texts Lestrade under the table.

Minutes later Lestrade and Donovan burst into the room as if the future of the free world is threatened. Sherlock rolls his eyes and is about to leave them to it but there is a clatter of furniture and the dull thud of a lifeless weight hitting the floor.

The stress of the arrest has dislodged the murderous cabbie's aneurysm and he expires in a greying heap as the large gelatinous clot bursts in his brain.

Sherlock celebrates solving the case with a bowl of long life noodles at a nice Chinese restaurant nearby that he knows stays open late. He finishes with three fortune cookies which he always enjoys because of how they contradict one another, then goes home and sits in the dark and ponders blood clots.

It's boring celebrating alone.

 

Chapter 1.5

 

I have two livers if you would like them.  
molly

Diseased or clean?  
SH

Clean.  
molly

Thank you. I'll pick them up later today.  
SH


	2. Chapter 2

"It's going to take time to adjust."

John, marked by his third year tutors as having the best bedside manner in his group, regards his therapist with the same patient disappointment he has for every one these days. She ploughs on regardless.

"How's the blog going?"

He looks around the room. What am I doing here? "Great, thanks." 

"You still haven't written anything, have you?"

"No."

She makes some brief notes in her notebook, using her smallest handwriting and the most cryptic shorthand she can manage. John watches briefly and gives up when he realises he won't be reading his notes upside down again.

"I'm going to make a suggestion."

John raises his eye brows lightly, courteous, wholly untrusting. "Okay."

"I'm going to recommend you see an employment agency. I've referred a lot of patients to Reynolds and had good results."

"I can't practice," and he holds out his left hand to show her its relentless tremor, then uses it to draw attention to his aching leg which he has stretched stiffly before him.

"Okay, maybe you can't practice medicine but you can still do meaningful work." John scoffs in his heart. "Doing what?"

"Well, lots of things. You've got tertiary qualifications, you're bright, you've been a soldier and have lots of life experience. You could work in - I don't know, medical administration maybe, maybe health policy."

"An office job?"

She nods, watching as his eyes move down slowly, his face turns away and his gaze is cast out to the garden.

"John, I know it's not what you want but you have start building some kind of structure in your life if you want to recover."

Recover. John wonders idly what exactly he would be recovering. The man who he was before he went to war, maybe: drinks at the pubs with mates on Thursday night, a good run every morning, watching international test matches on Saturday afternoon with a beer, sleeping the whole night through in the dark. An optimistic man who found life interesting because he knew something big was coming. That man seems uninformed and so far away as to be irretrievable. John wondered if there was anything he could do to bring him back.

 

Then he remembered that nothing was ever going to happen to him again and this grey limping ghost was all that was left.

Might as well get that nothingness underway. 

"Okay. I'll go see Reynolds."

Chapter 2.5

I need a piece of pulmonary artery.  
SH

I have four, but one was a mva accident and is ruptured.  
molly

Four is satisfactory. I'll be in late this afternoon.  
SH

C U then  
molly

Capital S e-e y-o-u  
SH

You're the only person I know who corrects texts.  
molly


	3. Chapter 3

"So … exactly what kind of work would you like to pursue?"

John, who struggled to stitch evenly when he first started suturing and worked extra hours bent over corpses in the student labs until he got it right, is wearing his only suit, sitting at a large desk made cheaply from blonde wood, staring at a large puffy woman called Beverly. She has declared herself his employment agent.

"Well, I'm a doctor. An army doctor. I served in Afghanistan for six, nearly seven years." 

"Oooooh!" Beverly makes a girlish, surprised face. John wants to smash the desk with his  
cane. "So you're hoping for a career in medicine?"

I had a career in medicine. John's hand spasms and he presses it still between his knees. "No. I have injuries. I can't practice at the moment."

Beverly is unconcerned. She taps at her computer and rolls the tip of her tongue over her lips while she reads through a list of possible employment opportunities. Her lipstick doesn't budge; John thinks it must be some kind of lacquer. He imagines kissing that painted mouth and feels a little knot of repulsion roll in his stomach.

"Ooooooh! Here's one that might be perfect for you!" She taps a few more keys and a printer near her desk whirrs into life. While she leans over to grab the paper, John watches the small creases that form in her tight jumper as it catches and gathers around her thick belly. It would be bouncy, that belly, soft and warm. He wishes she'd get rid of the lipstick because that belly is an inviting possibility.

"You know, this job could be perfect for you." 

John sits up a little straighter. "Really?"

"Ooooooh, I think you're going to love it." She tosses the paper over to him, misses and it floats softly to the floor. "You read about it and I'll book you in for an interview. Can you go now?" 

John has bent down with some discomfort to retrieve the paper. His heart sinks as he reads the position for a manager of sales team in a pharmaceutical company. "I can't do this," he says miserably but Beverly is already cooing over the phone at someone in the pharmaceutical company  
and talking about John as if she's known him for years.

John wonders if anyone would notice if he wore the same suit to work forever.


	4. Chapter 4

"You can't wear pyjamas to dinner."

Sherlock has not had a case for three days. If there is no case, and nothing to do, he operates on the brink of fizzing madness wherein getting dressed is the least of his worries.

He spent the first caseless day lying on the couch with his feet planted flat against the wall, his head hanging of the edge, his curls tumbling towards the floor, blood pooling in the top of his brain. He was trying to render himself unconscious. It didn't work because it couldn't sustain his interest long enough. He gave up after a couple of hours, drank some hot water, counted all the fleur de lys designs in the wallpaper (there 267 but if you count each piece at the edge of the paper and combine them into whole pieces there are 274) and the re-read treasured passages from The Italian Journey:

Everything I see around me suggests two lines of inquiry which I shall not fail to pursue when I see my way more clearly.

It was all unsatisfactory so he sucked up two fat lines and sent small bolts of fire back and forth along his synapses, stayed up all night and early the next morning on the second caseless day went out in his pyjamas for some milk. When he got home he realised there wasn't any tea so he went out again. There were more people out this time and more people stared at him which annoyed him slightly. There is no way to stop people looking at you but they shouldn't. It's bad manners.

The tea was somewhat satisfactory but it made him slightly full. He spent a few interesting minutes pressing his intestines, chasing small lines of bubbles and liquid through the soft tract. Then he sat down to a read A Book of Luminous Things. It was a promising title; Sherlock is very partial to luminous things. He found the book wanting. Granted, a few of the poems were definitely conductors of light but there was little luminosity. He did another two lines and plucked aimlessly at the violin for a while then another two lines which kept him awake the rest of the night, trying to recall the contents of the Luminous book in the order that he had read it. When he managed that he tried to do it backwards. He closed his eyes to sleep at the first signs of light of the third caseless day.

He woke up sharply at 2pm when his phone chirped at him but it was only Mycroft. He read the message in case it was the start of a satisfying argument that he would more than likely win but it was just an invitation to dinner. The phone was tossed lightly to the floor and Sherlock wondered how long he could lay there without emptying his bladder. Not long, as it turned out.

While he was in the bathroom he figured he may as well have a shower too. While he showered he wondered exactly how much water his hair would hold when it was soaking wet and how he might accurately measure that. He marked that interesting inquiry with a mental post it note and then wondered how many people are injured in bathrooms each year, and what the most common injury might be. He concluded that taps would be the main culprit while conceding that most people would automatically assume glass.

He grew tired of thinking about taps and tap-related injuries so as he dried and dressed, he wandered amongst his lists of personal pleasures and stopped at Schubert.

Ah, Schubert.

He played Schubert's Serenade and it made him wistful because it was actually made to be played to someone and Sherlock had lived alone for twelve years. It was highly probable that he  
would never serenade anyone, unless you counted Mrs Hudson which, love her though he did in his way, he didn't.

A few weeks earlier he had mentioned to Mike Stamford that he would like a flatmate. Because Mike likes to help, and because he likes crosswords, Sherlock sought to make the quest challenging and a little sad by adding that no one would want to live with him. It was a waste of human endeavour because Mike hadn't come up with anyone. Sherlock was pretty certain that he didn't even try.

It wasn't easy. No one in their right mind would want to live with him but the fact remained that he felt lonely sometimes. Other people had friends. Even deplorable people had friends. Look at Anderson. He was odious. He found a friend, the bristly Sally Donovan, and they were enjoying a very profitable friendship indeed. It can't be that hard.

Then he texted Mycroft back and said he'd go to dinner if Mycroft picked him up and took him back home.

But of course, Mycroft texted back. Sherlock could feel his brother sneering and this pleased him momentarily.

That afternoon Sherlock sat in his chair with closed eyes and his chin rested on an apex of fingers while he calculated, against his better judgment, the kinds of things he would like in a friend.

He couldn't come up with anything, although he made a substantial list of things he didn't like in people and wouldn't tolerate in a friend. This rendered the whole exercise useless and Sherlock found himself once again resigned to the fact that he would be alone on this earth for all time.


	5. Chapter 5

"Are you a real hospital doctor or one of those university doctors?"

John, who topped his final year in pathology, obstetrics and an elective unit in trauma surgery, has no idea who is speaking to him. Perhaps it's some woman from Accounts. Sally? Selina? John can't remember.

There is nothing wrong with the job. Everyone treats him with kindness and interest, everyone has made it their personal, unspoken responsibility to assist a real live war hero to make the adjustment to civilian life. John feels their trust and awe and it makes him feel like the worst kind of fraud. The pains in his leg grow worse, his hand is never still and his sleep is a muesli of terrifying dreams and horrendous sweats that leave him slack and dehydrated.

Currently he is sitting in his office at a desk made cheaply from pine painted in a syrupy red paint meant to resemble teak, wondering what on earth he is supposed to say at the meeting he is scheduled to attend in five minutes. Shona stands in the doorway, trying her luck.

"I'm a medical doctor." John looks past her and can see Paul, the courier, chatting up one of the office temps in the background.

"Like, a doctor who does operations and shit?"

He opens his mouth to regain a little dignity for his chosen profession but decides there's no point. "Yes." He has seen this woman before, and in fact is certain he was introduced to her on the first day. She is perhaps thirty two or thirty four, has serious red hair and a fondness for animal prints skirts. Today it is a snow leopard print. It's tight and looks a little uncomfortable. John finds himself surprisingly attracted to her in her snow leopard skirt. He lifts his chin a little and smiles. "I'm sorry, you're ... Susan?"

"Close!" and she wriggles a little bit. "I'm Shona!"

He wrinkles his face in an embarrassed apology. "Shona. Sorry. You work in accounts, don't you?"

"Personnel. It's near accounts!"

Another person whose name John can't remember comes to remind him of the meeting.

"Yes, thank you, I haven't forgotten." John gathers some papers from his desk and pats around other papers, looking for his biro. The unnamed person walks away but Shona stays there, watching him closely. He's rather cute, even with the cane. She might have a chance here.

"A group of us go down to the pub on Friday nights. You should come! Do you like a drink?" 

"Oh, sure. Thanks. I'd like to come."

So maybe things are looking up.

The meeting is so dull that John falls asleep after seven minutes, before they've even got to the National Monthly Sale Figures. Other managers, aware of his troubled medical history, figure that narcolepsy is one of his symptoms and they continue the meeting in whispers. John wakes up as the meeting is finishing when the person who was sitting next to him, whose name John also doesn't know, accidentally knocks him with her chair as she leaves.

"Sorry!" she says in a loud stage whisper.

For a moment John can't recall where he is. "No, you're fine, don't worry about it," he says with a cloudy mouth.

He looks around the strange room with the cheap furniture. Another person, also who's name John doesn't know, asks if he's okay. Yes, he assures them, I'm fine.

And then it comes back to him. I'm here, in my life, in my only suit, working in some office in High Barnet, managing the monthly sales lists of a pharmaceutical company.

My nightmares, he realises, have all come true.


	6. Chapter 6

"Oh, look at you, all comfy and sweet in your lounging clothes."

Professor Amarita Crisp is one of the world's most respected cardiac thoracic surgeons. She trained at Brompton in the sixties, a sight for sore eyes with her thick dark hair and soft matte skin that seemed to absorb light and small strong hands and scandalously short skirts.. Every man in London at that time thought she'd make a great wife if she wasn't so much smarter than all of them.

Her achievements were legendary - up to Girton when she was seventeen, gobbling up courses and graduating with her masters in Natural Science at 21, mother of two small boys, part of the core Brompton surgical team and teaching post graduate courses in medicine when she was thirty three.

Now, at 72, the hair's cut short and her dresses more modest but she still works prodigious hours, still travels the world to address conferences, is still the last word in grafting of arteries, the use of anti-coagulants in valve replacements, best practice in preventing rejection of transplants in the first 36 hours and still a member of the core team who are now developing the first artificial heart made from synthetic tissue that mimics human muscle.

She is vivacious and funny and so smart she make people's eyes water. Her cleverness comes with no conditions and no apologies.

But great cleverness doesn't guarantee you perfect performances in every area of life: Amarita is a lousy cook, an appalling accountant, an irresponsible driver, can't carry a tune, fails to keep up with daily news, can't remember people's names, phone numbers or where she put her keys, is uninterested in ironing, indifferent to housework generally and was frankly a pretty disinterested mother, at least until her boys had grown up, left home and started fending for themselves.

Her boys adore her. Every few weeks they turn up to the family home in Mayfair squabbling for her attention, all but elbowing each other out of the way to have her to themselves for a few precious moments.

Her youngest son stands before her now, smiling delightedly at her for noticing his pyjamas, bending in to kiss her pale slightly papery cheek. She wears Cabochard, like she has always done, and the deep, wantonly intelligent scent comforts him immediately.

"Now Sherlock, why are you wearing pyjamas? Have you lost all your clothes again?"

"Isn't he pitiful?" Mycroft leans in to kiss her too, gently nudging Sherlock out of the spotlight.

"There's just no point in getting dressed." Sherlock is annoyed to lose her attention so quick but the night is young. He can out-manoeuvre Mycroft yet.

Amarita has already lost interest.

"I had no idea what to serve so we're just having everything." 

Everything indeed - she has ordered in an inexplicable selection of lamb curry, Chinese dumplings, garlic bread, pad thai and chicken kiev.

There is an ominous shuffling sound from the end of the hall. It grows louder step by step, and both men look up expectantly at an ancient bowed figure clutching a glossy black phone in his left hand.

Because she was brilliant and because descends from one of London's wealthiest families, Amarita was expected to make an most advantageous marriage. There was much speculation, as she continued to dazzle people with her phenomenal brain and remarkable beauty, who she would chose, or if she would even bother choosing anyone at all, given the queues of men who would have kept her company in shifts for the rest of her life.

True to form, Amarita baffled everyone when, in 1968, she eloped with the man least likely, a stern, wild haired young philosophy don whose intellectual gifts were so onerous he walked in a perpetual stoop, apparently weighed down by the heavy burden of his great mind.

So vast was his intellect that, not long after Sherlock's birth, he had to give up teaching entirely because his thoughts had become too complex, and his reasoning too brilliant, so that neither students nor his fellows could understand him. Dissertations are still undertaken today by foolhardy, ambitious post graduate students, desperately trying to unravel his extraordinary thinking.

Mycroft was already off at Dulwich when his father retired but baby Sherlock was still chewing rusks under the watchful eye of his nanny and thus spent his earliest years enjoying the closest interaction with either parent that either boy would know. It failed entirely to assist him in developing any crucial social skills but made him the first four year old who was able to competently explain Cartesian Dualism.

Not long after Sherlock was bundled off to join his brother at school, Papa's thinking became even more intense and more expansive to the extent that he had difficulty actually expressing it in any kind of reasonable sentence. Eventually, for the sake of his health, he reduced all his communications to one word. Consequently he rarely goes out because no one outside his immediate family has a clue what he's on about.

More recently, as Mummy continues to travel and the boys can visit less frequently, the family worried that the limited social interaction would cause Papa to atrophy and be unable to say any words at all. Then Mycroft or Sherlock (it depends who you ask) hit on the brilliant idea on getting Papa a text buddy. Thus he spends hours every day involved engrossing conversations on a Galaxy II with a person whose primary job is to keep Papa chatting and preventing his magnificent, inaccessible brain from collapsing in on itself.

The brothers greet their father with enthusiasm and affection. "Hello Papa!" He accepts embraces from both and generously kisses each head. They wait with great anticipation to see who he will address.

The old man rubs the soft silky flannel of Sherlock's dressing gown and his eyes brighten like crystals that catch the sun.

"Nocturne!" he declares, and then he shuffles off back to his study. 

Sherlock turns to Mycroft with a sardonic mouth. "He likes me best."  
Amarita, five foot four in her stockings and dainty like a dancer, pats both her tall sons on their shoulders. "Sherlock, don't be beastly. Do come and have dinner with me, both of you."

The boys gather around her at the table. They eat straight from the cartons with plastic forks or chopsticks as required, because there are no plates.

(There had been plates many years ago, a full dinner service of creamy flat Wedgwood plates with broad lips of gold trim. Sherlock, aged 14, had broken all of them in one go after an especially intense episode of inconsequential sibling torment with Mycroft found him cornered in the kitchen and quite likely to pummelled to a bloody pulp. The plates had been stacked on the counter behind him and, one by one, Sherlock smashed them in front of him. "It's a force field," he snarled at his brother. "You can't get through it."

"Neither can you, imbecile," Mycroft, sweating with rage, snarled back. 

"But I'm safe."

Papa, who in those days only emerged from his study if he thought an alternative reality may have appeared, shuffled out to the kitchen. He regarded both his sons silently. He looked at the smashed plates at Sherlock's long bare feet. He looked at Mycroft (also in bare feet)who had  
clenched fists and a face marbled with rage, ready to reduce Sherlock to grain if he could only reach him. Papa nodded approvingly.

"Euclidean." And then he shuffled back to his study. 

Sherlock had smirked at his brother. "He likes me best.")

In any case neither Amarita nor her mostly wordless mate bothered replacing the plates. There were just so many other things.

But now sharing dinner they are content, chattering happily and with great vivacity. Amarita asks Mycroft about his work; he tells her eagerly of negotiations he has underway in Nairobi for some lucrative contracts in new quinoa farms since they'd undermined the market in South America. Sherlock bristles but waits his turn, when he can tell her about solving the not exactly suicides case and the aneurism in the cab driver who collapsed on his arrest and his own inability to render himself unconscious by trying to drain all his blood to his head.

"You'd need to obstruct your breathing, darling. Pooling alone won't knock you out unless you have secondary respiratory issues. You're still too healthy. If you need to be unconscious, why don't you just get someone to knock you out?"

"I'd rather do it myself, Mummy."

Mycroft is pinching dumplings with chopsticks. "I'll gladly help you."

"Mycroft, you're being cruel. Let him do his own experiments. Now have you had some broccoli? I ordered it especially to counteract the chili. They cook it perfectly at this place, it's quite crunchy. Some kind of Chinese steaming method that looks easy but is fiendishly difficult, I expect. Sherlock, try this chicken and tell me if I should order again."

When Sherlock gets home that night he doesn't do any lines and he doesn't think about the likelihood of never having any friends. Instead he has a bath during which he soaks quietly while carefully fitting each toe, one by one, into the tap with varying success, dries off on a clean towel, changes into clean pyjamas and settles into bed quite comfortably, remembering the rare nights at home during the Christmas breaks when he would be dozing, close to sleep, and the soft scent of Cabochard would sparkle on the dark air around him, a small strong hand would pat his back and he'd feel her beautiful face up close as she kissed his temple.


	7. Chapter 7

"You're a warlock?"

 

John, who as an intern, once delivered five babies in ninety minutes despite not having slept for sixteen hours, is trying, he really is. He has become a permanent fixture in his mind-numbing job and now, at the suggestion of his therapist, is moving out of the ugly cloud grey walls of his miserable subsidised flat to live amongst ordinary people.

He has spent the last couple of weeks trawling internet sites, looking for a place where he might live in relative contentment with people he doesn't want to kill.

It seems they're in short supply.

Most people his age are either married with children, divorced with custody issues or well into their second relationship and managing a blended family. Thus the people John has met so far are all young, confused, immature, bitter and twisted or older but living alone for a very good reason.

John is visiting a nice town house in Brent's Cross. It could be perfect, because the second bedroom is at the back of the house on the ground floor and looks out on to the garden. Out here no one would hear him screaming.

The nice home is being paid off, with some financial stress, by a solicitor called Charlotte, who insists as soon as they meet that John call her Charlie. She works at one of the big law firms in the City and is hoping to become an expert in intellectual property, which is, of course, booming. As they talk, John learns that until recently Charlotte - who doesn't really strike John as a Charlie - wanted to be an expert in criminal law.

"Did you find it too distressing?" For these days, poor John is constantly looking for someone to whom he can connect, someone, anyone who understands what it is like to find your self in a world where everything seems to have become too hurtful to manage.

"Well, sort of, but mostly people who you have to represent have really bad energy. I mean, I just couldn't handle all these people who just deliberately break the law."

They were interrupted by a tall man in very loose jeans and an especially vibrant lime coloured shirt who extended his long bony hand to John. It was not pleasant to touch.

"Oh, and this is my boyfriend, Colin!" 

John nodded mildly.

"Blessings." Colin maintained an inappropriate eye contact which, coupled with the inane greeting, made John want to hit him with his cane.

Colin was not interested in small talk. "You should know, if this all works out and we find we can relate honestly and share space, that I'm a warlock. Would that bother you?"  
John isn't sure because who ever meets more than one warlock? He lies and says no, no, that would be fine.

"Cool!"

Charlotte moves the negotiations forward.

"The rent's a 150 pounds a week and we buy our own groceries. We split the housework, and if you take the room, you've got your own bathroom that you have to keep clean. The last woman here was a slob and it really ruined the energy of the house. "

John nodded. He'd been in the army for years, he told her. Order and neatness were his specialities.

They're just about to set off and look at the room when a voluminous champagne coloured cat  
skulked through the room, crouched down low as if it thought that keeping close to the floor might make it invisible.

Colin the warlock has facts at his fingertips. "Oh, and this is Rhonda. She's not ours, the first guy who lived here left her behind when he moved out and we haven't got around to getting rid of her. Are you cool with cats? Only the last chick was allergic and didn't get on with Rhonda AT ALL."

John desperately wants to ask if it upset the energy of the house but bites his tongue . "I'm fine with cats." 

On hearing this Rhonda stopped in her tracks, turned her sour face and stared at John with rigid concentration. It was endearing for a few seconds, and Charlie said, "Oh look! She likes you!" and then it was a little unnerving and when more than a minute passed it was outright weird.

"Man, that cat is tripping on you." Colin the warlock looked at John with renewed interest. "Cats are really psychic about these things. She can tell you're the right person."

John thought that the cat was just spooked because there was a warlock in the room but wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

"I like cats." Which, strictly, was true,. He didn't wish them any harm and they didn't make him sneeze.

"You have to be a Libra." Colin is leaning over towards him, hands clasped together tightly. He smells like oats.

(In John's office every morning, there is a little ritual: Shona drops by everyone and reads their horoscope from the local paper. When asked for his birthday John, who is far too damaged for soothsaying or any esoteric promise of a better life, lied and said he was born in June. He's about to tell the same lie when he realises that he may very well have to provide some kind of documentation to Charlotte about his work or banking details.)

"My birthday's May 15th. What does that make me?"

Apparently that was even better than a Libra. "Oh awesome, a Taurus! That's fantastic for the house energy. No wonder Rhonda's digging you."

John looks over to the cat who has crept away to hide behind the couch. She peers out at him with a quarter of her face.

It's all a bit too much. "Right. Might I see the room?"

John has half decided that he simply can't live with a warlock and a cat who clearly has behavioural problems, but the walk to the room is a long one - especially so on a cane - and does seem to provide some separation from the rest of the house. He is certain he could have nightmares here in peace.

And then Charlie opens the door and John sees the wide window that looks out on to trees and a small patch of grass and other houses, everything in colour even against this grey Saturday morning and he says, even before he sees the lone squirrel staring off in to the distance in the largest tree outside, oh this will do nicely. Yes, this is very nice. I'd love to live here.


	8. Chapter 8

"PUT YOUR TROUSERS ON!"

Sherlock is part of the way through the day he will later call the naked day.

His face is squeezed tight with irritation as he steps carefully into his especially nice Hugo Boss trousers, which have been transported here by a custard coloured MI6 agent who did whatever Mycroft told him to. Sherlock hates the agent because he is insipid, aligned to Mycroft and has an extremely handsome gun for which Sherlock has many practical applications but cannot actually steal. This is unsatisfactory because usually Sherlock is excellent at pick pocketing, pilfering and petty theft. For a time when he was in the fourth form, he ran a rather lucrative business of shoplifting by request that all but saw him nearly expelled for the third time. (Sherlock, for many years, held his school's record for the student who was nearly expelled most. It was only broken a few years ago and that was after they invented smart phones.)

He also hates the MI6 agent because he has ruined Sherlock's insouciant near-nakedness by bringing clothes that Sherlock has to wear, although no one can give him a definitive reason why. In a way Sherlock is rather chuffed to be at Buckingham Palace and rather chuffed to be the only person (probably) who attended Court wearing just a bed sheet. Not Mycroft, the MI6 agent or the Monarchy can take that away from him. It's an accolade, Sherlock thinks sourly as he buttons his shirt, that should be shared with a friend. If Anderson had the gumption, wit, genius and connections to get into Buckingham Palace in a bed sheet, he'd be able to talk about it with Sally.

The MI6 agent is not interested in Sherlock's bed sheet or Sherlock all that much. Sherlock is now alphabetising all the small details about the MI6 agent and the seven corgis who likely make his life miserable and files them in the Mycroft archive.

So far Sherlock hates this day and, at this stage in proceedings, is not especially enchanted by the case: some boring inbred bint who has managed to have herself photographed by a sex worker while on the receiving end of a riding crop is not the kind of enthrallment he believes he has prepared himself for. When he is fully dressed he sits elegantly, behaves with great deference and courtesy as he has bred to do but even as he makes his way to Belgravia is thinking that it should only take a couple of minutes and then he can go back to pacing his flat and wait for a real case.

But she rocked him, the woman, rocked him the way tidal waves rock the delicate ecologies of sea beds. It was not just her naked skin, dull and smooth like clotted creamed contrasted with the coal black of her hair and pubic hair and contrasted again with the ruby smear of her painted mouth and her small nipples which would disappear entirely under a curious thumb tip. It wasn't her coy smile or even the heady waves of Patou's 1000, the most complex and extravagant perfume ever created, that radiated from the thin tight skin on the nape of her neck and clung in small thin clouds in her hair.

It wasn't that in her nakedness and gently curved smallness she reminded Sherlock that he was tall, broad shouldered, angular, manly and stronger than her, that he could pick her up and carry her across the floor with no effort if the mood struck.

It wasn't that she was smarter. It wasn't that she stabbed him with a syringe full of decidedly cheap opiate and furnished him senseless for five hours. She was smarter but it transpired he was smarter after all and he out smarted her eventually. It wasn't that.

It wasn't her cold beauty that, in certain lights, became a soft, heart breaking prettiness. It wasn't that she threatened to do him twice without mercy because frankly people had offered before and he's not all that interested. His prerequisites for anyone who wants to do him twice with or without mercy are very specific and at this point in history have not been matched in their entirety by anyone.

It wasn't any of that. It wasn't just her femininity or her power or her connections or the huge vault of knowledge about every carnal or depraved or pathetic or unlawful sexual activity that would no doubt would outshine his in practice if not in theory.

It wasn't that she told him that brainy was the new sexy because he'd known that for years and in every case had cause to capitalise on that very fact to varying extents of appreciation.

It wasn't even that she had successfully second-guessed him because everyone had been trying to that do that to him since as far back as he could remember, although it was that a little bit, because she second guessed him very well, with her slim legs and the breasts that, if she walked to you, lips parted and anticipating, would sway gently until you cupped them to stillness in your hand.

It was that on their first meeting that she had nothing on and that meant he had nothing to go on and that he couldn't help but stare at her everything. She gave him nothing but her soft pearly skin and her sly painted eyes and he could only stare at her with unexpected admiration like any man and it highlighted to him his yearning and loneliness and she saw that immediately so she won, hands down, in the first round and although he was able to out run her eventually and even bow with grace and shower her with mercy in the end game, she won.

It was his game and she won without even trying, that woman.


	9. Chapter 9

"Did we?"

John, who has had sex with a total of fifteen people and surreptitiously palpated their spleen every time, isn't sure. He and Shona (who in his head he still calls Susan) have finally spent the night at her place. It was a miserable decision, made by both with half-hearted resignation - she had fancied him for ages and figured she'd have to have him sooner or later, while he thought he really needed to get back on the horse (figuratively) and have sex with someone.

Might as well be now, they each decided privately.

So, after months of badgering, he went for drinks at the pub on Friday night with everyone else. He and Shona left only when they were three parts wankered, slurring both of them and touching hands and arms for longer and longer, both enjoying the safe, promising parts of flirting, leaning in on each other's personal space, making leering, slightly inappropriate suggestions, smiling with dilated pupils and holding the gaze too long in case either was unsure of the other's drunken intentions.

They went back to her place in a cab where he kissed her first. She tasted of wine and a mint and some unidentifiable sourness that occurs in mouths as the small subtle stages of degradation simmer away in the digestive tract. Her mouth was surprisingly firm, her tongue was stiff and clogged his mouth.

John and Shona crept clumsily through her dark house, past the shut door of her flat mate's room, past the half opened door of her other flat mate who must have stayed somewhere else tonight, into Shona's room where, when she switched on the light, John wished he was anywhere but.

The room was disordered and slovenly. Clothes hung over all available surfaces, the bed was unmade, shoes and purses and magazines were scattered all over the floor. The collection of possessions and pictures and the small indicators of her life and interests were pathetic, a little embarrassing to him. She was thirty two or something, may be older, but she lived like a teenager amongst ornaments of coloured clowns and pictures of her with friends in party frocks and a picture of nanna - hers or maybe someone else's - and a picture of her dog, posed besides a tapestry of a dog - all this coloured detritus that represented only parties and possession. No books, no hobbies, nothing in staid colours, only pink and baby blue and yellow.

He liked order, he liked neatness, he liked neutral colours. He liked to think that he would share something with a partner, that they would meet on gradient where their tastes and interests intersected. Shona was in someone else's graph.

He started loosening her blouse anyway and she responded by pulling at his shirt, but they were both so drunk that it ended up being easier to undress themselves which they did with a sort of bravado that gradually built to an increasing shyness and eventually a thwarted shame. She reached over to flick off the light but he filled with the shapeless terror and said as calmly as he could, no, no need, let's leave it on.

John crept into the rumpled bed beside her, under the thin sheets and moved over towards the warmth of her skin to slip his arms around her ribs and to his surprise he felt peppery little tears spring to his eyes because he has not understood, until he felt this close embrace against his naked skin, how horribly alone he is every hour of the day. The wretchedness of his life is suddenly unavoidable. He wants comfort, and now is willing to do just about anything or anyone to have it even for a few harshly lit minutes.

She is wrapping her legs around him but it doesn't feel sincere. There is no desire or tenderness; it is acts she has read about or seen in films and the lack of depth of her feelings for him mean they are actions only and not the heartfelt responses he craves. Her unwashed skin smells of artificial musk and a close reproduction of white flowers; her breasts are squashy and feel shapeless under his hands. She is thrusting at him with a lewd, gasping sort of laugh and he jams his eyes closed and aims at the slippery warm wetness that must, he hopes, offer some kind of payoff for this charade. For a few seconds he thinks it might but his heart's not in it and his mind races for an image or memory of anyone he might actually desire.

He struggles to come up with something that will sustain his interest, any image or thought that might assist in making this unlikely congress satisfying. He gets pictures from random porn he has watched, a clear image of the girl in accounts with the yellow dress that is a little loose around the waist, a zap of faces with wet mouths and fake tans from other porn films and then unexpected shot of lightning when he sees Paul the courier in his navy blue shirt smiling and the lines of his biceps and the soft sandpaper glint of the parts of his face where his beard has been scraped clear with a razor and God, oh God –

John shudders, teeth clenched and when his body stills he realises he has ejaculated without actually penetrating Shona but it makes no difference because she seems to have passed out.

He slumps back on the floral pillow, exhausted, ashamed and full of loathing. Shona lays heavily next to him, snoring softly with the tiniest growl on each exhale. John pushes her shoulder gently and she shifts slightly, the growl reduced to gentle puffs.

He hangs his arms over his eyes and feels them grow damp. He's never felt so alone, a cure for this emptiness has never seemed so unlikely.

 

Chapter 9.5  
I need a head with a full head of hair  
SH

Male or female?  
molly

Male.  
SH

Long hair or short hair? I have a Rastafarian.  
Molly

With hair as close to mine as possible.  
SH

Nothing at the moment. I'll be in contact when something comes in.  
molly


	10. Chapter 10

"Pew. Pew. Pew."

Sherlock sits sadly in his arm chair, arm extended in the best representation of a gun he can make, shooting imaginary bullets at the wall. He blames the custard coloured M16 agent for this entirely unsatisfactory imitation of shooting up the wall that is actually exacerbating his boredom.

There are no cases, there is no intrigue. He has texted Lestrade, he has scoured all the papers, he has banged the keys on his laptop because there's nothing in his inbox, he texted Lestrade again. In a moment or two he sends him another text.

There must be something .  
SH

There's nothing for christ sake get a hobby im too busy for this 

Sherlock is further annoyed . How hard is it to punctuate a text?

Apostrophe/full stop/capital letter/full stop/capitol letter/apostrophe/full stop.  
SH

he replies helpfully. Detective Inspector Lestrade deletes it almost immediately.

Sherlock pretend-shoots at his wall again but its only making it worse, so he looks out the  
window and is even more annoyed because there's no one around worth deducing and no crimes.

He turns to sneer at the wall - which will get it come uppence one day - and is blown clear across the room.

He lies there quite still, and his first thought is that the wall must have got in first. Plaster dust settles around him and shards of glass glitter all through the carpet. When his hearing has settled and he can tell that he is not wounded or even slightly hurt, he feels a delicious flash of excitement spark in every vein.

This is going to be brilliant.


	11. Chapter 11

"You didn't even kill it."

 

John, who once revived a dead man in an emergency room by instigating a desperate median sternotomy and throwing warm water over his still heart, is deteriorating rapidly.

It's everything, it's nothing. He's moved house, got a job - done everything his therapist suggested - and all of these things are making him worse.

Videlicet:  
He is living in the sex house. Charlotte and the Warlock never stop. John hears furniture thumping and rattling in the unmistakable rhythm & wails of copulation in the morning, in the evening, in the middle of the day on Saturdays when he just wants to do his washing, at night when he is watching videos of soldiers coming home to their teary families and hysterical dogs on You Tube, in the middle of the night when he might be having a small stretch of purposeful sleep unaffected by nightmares.

They just never stop. John wonders if they have a clinical problem.

It's possible he'd forgive them if they kept their fecundity to the bedroom but they seem to be singularly without any boundaries. John has, to his squirming embarrassment, walked on them so many times in the kitchen or lounge room or hallway that he is starting to think they mate with the hope that he will interrupt them.

He wonders if they ever wipe down the shared surfaces afterwards. The thought nags him to bilious caution and he stops eating at home.

Their complete lack of concern has explained to John why Rhonda is a blithering mess. She is, in her small animal way, as traumatised and embarrassed as John. On his first night in the house, once she established he was a single man, she crept into his room and hid under the bed. The next night she peered out briefly to miaow and at him and let him know she was there. Evening, Captain!

"Oh, hello, Rhonda. Should you be in here?"

Outside in the kitchen pots rattled and the house thumped. Rhonda crept back under the bed. A few days later he came home to find her asleep in his laundry hamper.

Why do they need to fuck so continuously, John wonders as he lays in his bed, eyes raw and arms wrapped tightly around his chest after a round of particularly vicious dreams. The ceiling above him seems to be weakening. They could come crashing through any moment.

Work offers no respite. Once there he faces a whole different raft of issues that hammer at his crumbling psyche.

He can manage the administration and has even started to become quite adept at spreadsheets but the nature and philosophy of the work galls him. Doctors don't want to be bullied by pharmaceutical companies yet here he is, a doctor employed expressly to supervise people who bully doctors into taking meetings from pharmaceutical companies.

And every blithering fact or achievement is the purpose of a meeting. What could be established in three minutes often stretches over ninety. Sometimes people make power point presentations. Just the sound of a laptop opening in the meeting room makes John (if he's awake) want to howl.

He wants to leave the job but has no idea where to go or what he should do. He longs to bark orders at nurses, make urgent decisions about blood loss, stent split arteries and monitor lung capacities but it seems all he is good for now is to work for another pharmaceutical company

where he will have to be introduced to a whole raft of new people whose names he won't remember and be forced to sit through an endless deluge of pointless meetings in rooms done out in wenge and chrome with some colleague bumping him with their chair and waking him up.

Money has not brought him happiness. His bank account swells but John can't think of anything he wants to do, apart from be back in an unpredictable dangerous war in his scrubs, living on his wits and striving in every action to do no harm while harm stalks him like a panther.

He hates getting out of bed in the morning because he is exhausted from patchy sleep and he has to leave the house, and that means he has to walk past Charlotte and her warlock and it's likely they'll be at it like rabbits. 

He hates work because everyone is so nice to him because they think of him as a disabled war hero and treat him like someone with a terminal illness. Except for Shona, who these days pretends he doesn't exist.

Nothing is happening. His whole life is a loop of tedious commitments and tribulations that mean absolutely nothing. He is losing a grip on everything.

Of an evening when he gets home he goes into his room without looking around him and curls up on the bed while Rhonda watches from his laundry hamper.

She's grateful for an ally and saddened by John's inability to catch his own food, so occasionally will bring him presents. Today it is a little wood mouse with a victim complex.

"Oh, dear God, no," John says when he opens his bedroom door and sees Rhonda waiting patiently on his bed with the mouse hanging limply in her mouth.

She drops it as he approaches and John, who has fought violent addicts in emergency wards, the Taliban, crazed villagers and his own troops on odd occasions when they lost their minds, can barely bring himself to look at it.

"On my bed? Seriously?"

Rhonda watches from the floor and mews in an excited pitch. It's good eating, Captain! Still warm!

The mouse, it turns out, is fine, just utterly resigned to the futility of life. John picks it up carefully and, as far as his medical skills allow, can see no injury or even trauma. He wonders if the mouse didn't just throw itself in the path of Rhonda in a deliberate attempt at self harm.

The tiny whiskers and dew drop of a nose make him smile a little.

He puts it back down on the bed to see if it's okay but it just sits there, staring into space. 

"There's nothing wrong with you," he tells the mouse. "Man up. You can't go on giving in every  
time a cat catches you."

Still it sits there. Rhonda mews behind him. How did my life get to this, John wonders sadly.

The front door slams, which means the warlock and his woman are home and the thumping is likely to start any minute. Rhonda rushes into the laundry hamper and this startles the mouse, who flies off the bed and runs with remarkable speed to the skirting board.

"No, no, no, please no," and John watches with slumped shoulders as the mouse slips in under some invisible gap between the board and floor into a warm dark spacious shelter where it can live in abysmal contentment.

"Great." He turns to the Rhonda who sits in the hamper with her back turned to him resolutely. "Thanks for that."

He curls up on his bed, jams his head under the pillow, closes his eyes and hopes that when he wakes up everything, including him, will be gone.


	12. Chapter 12

"That will be four hundred and forty pounds."

 

Life is full of disappointments. Sherlock had been certain that an explosion could only be the start of something big, that something or someone sinister was sending him a barely disguised message that he was on notice, and that the game, the real game, was on.

Sadly it was just a gas leak, and not a fiendishly clever explosion cleverly designed to look like the kind of explosion a gas leak might cause but that would be apparent to a genius, or a very competent forensic pyrotechnic expert, to be an act of deliberate sabotage.

It was a gas leak.

The glazier is an aggressive thick set Scotsman with sandy hair and nursing the oily dregs of a truly remarkable hangover. Sherlock finds him quite pleasing and treats him with commensurate disdain by sitting motionless in his chair, reading a copy of the Telegraph, watching every miniscule move he makes while apparently ignoring him entirely.

Married. Two children, one toddling, the other tiny and still squalling. Lives in a flat, rides a motor cycle to work, hung over. Front loading washing machine.

When the glazier finishes and grunts the bill, Sherlock uses one of Mycroft's credit cards to pay for his new windows. He wasn't certain if he had insurance.

It's all very disappointing.

But one disappointment can be the harbinger for some excellent fortune, and Lestrade passes the glazier on the stairs.

"Who was that?" he asks, jerking his thumb in the direction of the glazier. 

Sherlock doesn't look up from his paper. "That was my stylist."

Lestrade is impressed. "Wondered why you always look so well dressed. But look, I need you to have a look at this."

He has brought a file with scraps of a brief supporting the investigation of the Broken Beer Bottle Killer. It provides some information about an especially unlikable person who stabs people in the throat with a broken beer bottle in abandoned houses. Each of the four victims has bled to death slowly and in horrible choking pain.

Sherlock reads the entirely inadequate autopsy reports, scoffs at the scabby crime scene descriptions and snorts at the assessment of the evidence left at the crime scenes.

Lestrade cuts him off at the pass.

"I'm really not in the mood to hear your opinions of my team. Thing is, I'm drawing a blank on this and I'm worried this toe rag isn't going to stop."

Sherlock still hasn't looked up. He has, though, already deduced that Lestrade has worn the same shirt two days running, that he slept in flannette sheets last night, that he only had a quick shower this morning, that he has only had coffee for breakfast and needs some solid food and that the person responsible for this change in the Detective Inspector's condition wears Youth Dew. Sherlock stops himself from sing-songing, "Lestrade's got a girlfriend!" and reads the file more closely. The most salient fact, the common denominator of each victim, catches his eye.

"They all had this nine-digit number tattooed on their left arm?" 

"Yeah. It's bizarre, isn't it? What do you reckon?"

"I don't reckon, I know."

Lestrade waits expectantly before he remembers who he's dealing with, and realises the answer will be delivered with series of clues obvious to no one but Sherlock, followed with an

astute, and unfailingly brilliant deduction.

Sherlock stretches out his hand. "Give me your mobile phone." 

"Where's yours?"

"Under the fridge." He waggles his fingers until Lestrade hands it over, still not looking up. He flicks to the photo of the most recent deceased at the front of the file, looks at the arm and punches a number into the phone, then waits with the phone pressed to his ear.

"This one - is he Peter Turton?"

"Yeah but - did you call some one? Who?"

"I called Peter Turton." Sherlock presses the phone to disconnect. "I just heard his mobile message."

Lestrade is lost. "Where did you get his number?"

"Look at the photo. No, better still, OBSERVE the photo."

Lestrade observes but it doesn't help him and he holds both bemused hands in front of him. "What?"

"The number! Tattooed on his arm! It's a mobile number only..." and he waits. 

"It's tattooed on back-to-front!"

"Oh, you're good at this." And Sherlock sits up, really intrigued. 

This one is definitely going to be brilliant.


	13. Chapter 13

"Did you steal that bird?"

 

John, who inherited his gun from a fellow soldier who hanged himself, is not getting any better. He arrives home on Thursday night to find a hastily scrawled note taped to his door.

JOHN  
WE'VE GONE TO BRIGHTON FOR THE WEEKEND TO THE FESTIVALS OF CRYSTELS SHOULD BE BACK SUNDAY PLS FEED RONDA  
BLESSINGS C +C

Having the house to himself and five days free of squalid humping in every room should have been a cause for celebration, but John is barely moved. Nothing surprises, interests or delights him any more.

It can't go on, he regularly tells Rhonda who watches with sympathy from the laundry hamper. I can't live like this.

Rhonda has taken to sleeping on John's feet when he goes to bed. She's made him and his monumental sadness her project. She spends her day sitting by the wall, listening to the tiny sounds on the other side and thinking she might be able to catch that mouse for him again, and when that fails she brings him home a small coloured parrot that she found in a back yard a few doors down the road.

It is perched on the edge of John's laundry hamper with a look of welcome when he comes home that night.

John stares at the little bird for some long seconds before turning his sad gaze to Rhonda. 

"That is obviously someone's pet."

And a pretty pet it is too. John is not much for ornithology but he estimates that the hot parrot is an African love bird. He'd be right.

It is a complete contrast to the mouse, who John too now hears rustling inside walls every night as he lays in bed, waiting for the nightmares to start. The bird looks around the room with detached curiosity and has no objections to John getting any closer.

He gently rests his index finger at the bird's wee soft chest and it hops on without fear. John slowly lifts his finger up to face level and looks closely at the pretty little creature.

It's not a bad gift.

The little bird holds on with the faintest sting of tiny claws while John looks around the room to see if he has any kind of suitable bird container. There's nothing so he places it back on the edge of the laundry hamper.

It's been a long time since any thing so pretty has been in his life. He takes a photo of it on his phone, and then another. While he's staring at the photo, and feeling keenly the lack of any colour in his life, and understanding that at this rate, things are going to continue being black and white, it occurs to him what he actually wants and how achieving that is really very simple.

He sits down on the side of the bed and looks over to the desk drawer where he keeps his gun.

All around him is grey and opaque with no signal that it will get any better. Quite suddenly he decides he just doesn't want to do any of it any more and there is not one good reason why he has to.

It comes to this, he decides.

It's not such a bad thing. I should have done it months ago.

He sits for a long time, his eyes moving slowly from the desk drawer, to the bird, the gathering night outside, back to the drawer. Not here, not now.

Tomorrow. Friday. The weekend.

Saturday. He was born on a Saturday; that the idea of dying on a Saturday is satisfying for him is testament to how depressed he is.

So, he says to himself, that's that sorted. Time to make plans. Bird first.

He limps over to his desk and sits down at his laptop, connects his phone and pastes the picture of the bird onto a blank document. After some deliberation he writes

HAVE YOU LOST THIS BIRD?

And then he adds his mobile number.

"I'm going to blame you when I return it," he says to Rhonda, who ignores him completely.

He hasn't eaten properly for weeks, and that's making him tired. He drops his clothes on the floor and curls up to sleep. The bad dreams start almost immediately, and once again he wakes up in jumps and starts, his skin slimy and hot, his mind clouded with the images of the people he loved or didn't know but couldn't save regardless, all the people he leaned over and watched bleed to death or choke or whose heart shuddered and jerked to a stand still under the stress of colossal pain, of himself bleeding to death in a stinking dry field in blistering heat, wondering if anyone was going to save him and if they did, would it be of any purpose.


	14. Chapter 14

"They definitely die at the scene."

 

Sherlock is crouched on his haunches, staring quite intently at a deep puddle of coagulated arterial blood. Detective Inspector Lestrade is standing above him holding a large ready lamp that casts a wide yellow light over the most recent murder scene.

As Sherlock stands, the Detective Inspector raises the lamp so Sherlock can follow, in reverse, the track of blood loss.

"They lose so much," The Detective Inspector says.

"Hmm. So he's stabbed here" - Sherlock points to the grimy wall where a triangular spray of bright blood blooms to the right -"then appears to slide down the wall slowly" - Sherlock traces a broad smear that travels for almost three feet - "and lands here, where he bleeds out. The wound is very big, so the time between the actual stabbing and landing on the ground would be about fifteen seconds."

"Which is actually a long time to be bleeding heavily."

"Definitely. He'd know that he was badly injured, he wouldn't be able to make any noise because his trachea is crushed, and his blood pressure would be dropping very rapidly because the blood is spurting out."

Sherlock reaches up to adjust the angle of the light again. Lestrade moves to fix the beam in the right position.

"What? On the ground again?" 

"Yes, if you wouldn't mind."

Sherlock crouches down a second time to look at the blood more closely. 

"So what do you see?"

"A lot of blood. But the same amount of blood that I've seen at the other three scenes." 

"And?"

Sherlock stands up quickly, but keeps his gaze on the wall. 

"Each killing is identical."

"Well, the killer obviously gets his jollies, serial killers do" –

"Wrong. Serial killers escalate. They improve and enhance their technique. They start with one or two acts, sometimes not resulting in an actual death, and as they keep killing, each act gets more depraved, provided they're not disturbed. These killings are identical - they're brought to an abandoned house with virtually no sign of a struggle, they're stabbed twice in an identical way, they bleed and ultimately die in almost an identical way, and only the part of the bottle used to kill them is found. Where are the other broken pieces?"

Lestrade sorts all this but it forms no coherent picture. "We never find them," he realises. 

"Exactly, He breaks the bottle somewhere else, and is armed with it when he gets here. 

"So?"

"So these are text book killings. There's no sexual element, no power element, no torture - just straight out stabbings performed with a generic, untraceable weapon, designed to bring death relatively quickly."

Lestrade still doesn't follow.

"And most importantly, there's no noise." 

"So? What murderer wants to make a noise?"

"Good point, but irrespective, a lot of them do, especially if they use a gun. This one doesn't.

He kills four young people, all drug users, all tattooed with a phone number. Where are we with the phone intercepts, incidentally?"

"I've had them rushed through. The electronics boffin compiling them said he have the first two victims completed by tomorrow."

"I'll need a copy as soon as possible."

Lestrade is about to say, "I'll see what I can do," but knows it not good enough. "I'll send you a copy as soon as I get them. But tell me. What do you think? A sadist? Another junkie? What?"

Sherlock dusts his Prada trousers with careful hands. "Executions," he says crisply. "Simple, effective executions."


	15. Chapter 15

"It's not my cat."

 

John, who hates treating attempted suicides more than any other ailment, has made up his mind to blow off the back of his head and now finds everything much easier.

He has a couple of things he wants to get out of the way before he goes.

First, he wrote a note and left everything he had to his sister. He hasn't seen her since he returned from Afghanistan. He'd slept on her couch for three nights, she gave him her old phone and told him to stay in touch. They talked briefly, worked hard not to fight with one another. He has no idea where she lived now or anything concerning her personal circumstances, but he did know she would probably welcome the money and that his passing wouldn't cause her much beyond a fleeting inconvenience.

Second, he wanted to relocate Rhonda. He hated the house but had the means to get away. Rhonda hated the house too but had neither the thumbs nor skills to escape and they'd become good mates. He wanted to help her.

Third, he wants to return the bird but no one has come forward. That might, John concedes, be the one thing he won't be able to fix.

Fourth, he wanted to be a considerate suicide and not leave any mess - physical or otherwise - for anyone to clean up. That means packing up his room.

Finally, he wanted to do it where he'd be found quickly, but not by children, not in anyone's private space, not anywhere the ghost of a suicide would cause distress. A church, a cemetery, somewhere quiet and empty. And in London. He loves London. The thought of dying right on its heart was comforting.

So on this Thursday, while Sherlock is sorting out the Broken Beer Bottle killer, John, who he has never met but would have if only he walked through the park and not around it, is going to his boring job for the last time.

It's someone birthday. It's always someone's birthday, there's always cake. John sits in the tea room with everyone else, marvelling at how easy they are with each other, envying their ability to live like this and find happiness in the quiet and predictable.

And then he surprises everyone by actually speaking unprompted, and not about work either. 

"Actually, one of you might be able to help me...I've got a cat that I need to re-home. Do any of  
you know of someone who wants a nice adult cat?"

The whole room is quiet. Spoonfuls of cake stall mid-air between paper plates and open mouths. Every set of his colleagues' eyes are on him and his skin burns, his hand stills and his leg is for a few seconds entirely pain free.

Then Michelle on reception smiles straight into his eyes.

"You know, the therapy cat at my nana's nursing home died a couple of weeks ago. The nurses there are looking for new cat."

And so the big cat conversation starts. Everyone wants to know about the cat and the employment opportunity for the cat. Have you got a picture? How old is it? What's her name? Who calls a cat Rhonda? Isn't she pretty! I used to have a cat like that when I was a kid but it was black and we called him Sausage. Why can't you keep her? Are you allergic? My Uncle Mick is allergic to cats. What nursing home is your nana in? How did the therapy cat die? What's a therapy cat?

John nods and answers best he can, his smile stretched and false, everything inside of him cold and dead.

Two down, three to go.

In the late afternoon he tidied his desk and left his computer on so his spreadsheets could be accessed. Tomorrow he planned to call in sick. He left the office that night with a sort of thickness in his heart but not sorry and not regretful. Shona, as always, didn't look up as he walked past her desk and for a second he almost stopped and asked her out for a drink, thinking he might be able to rectify her displeasure with him. But what the hell. What difference does it make.

He left without another word.

When he gets home to the empty house he turns on all the lights and walks straight to his room and starts packing.

There's not much - a few books, a few shirts, a few pairs of socks, a few jumpers, some papers, a couple of postcards he wrote to his sister in Afghanistan but never sent , a framed copy of his degree, his discharge papers.

Then there's some photos but he doesn't really want to look at them. He knows who's there, he knows what happened to them, he feels their absence or their departure very keenly every day.

He tucks them down next to his discharge papers.

Then there's the small drawstring bag filled with the a diaspora of objects left over from the Army: a couple of maps (folded and dirty), a couple of lists of all medical personnel (three of whom are now dead) from different camps John worked in, a couple of identity cards he'd been issued at different times, a small length of carefully woven coloured cord that was once a bracelet but has been cut near the knot that fastened it, a plastic hospital identity bracelet he'd worn after he was flown out of the field and admitted to an army hospital in Belgium before they flew him home and - he picks them up with fondness and a little reverence - his dog tags, the small flat discs with his name, his number, his birthday, his blood group and his religion, all the information about him worth knowing reduced to a tiny shiny surface that had sat flat against his chest for nearly seven years.

He holds them for a long time, smiles at them wanly, strokes the little metal globules that make up the chain on which they hang and finally, with a little awkwardness, hangs them back around his neck. They're cold, but he knows his heart will warm the up in no time at all.

He sits back and leans against the wall. Rhonda is dozing on the bed and looks over at where he's sitting with a small meow. He thinks for a long while, thinks about what it will be like to be dead, wonders if being dead is the end of all conscienceness and pain, or if there is an afterlife and he'll see people he knew, that they will be waiting for him.

John shrugs his shoulders. It seems unlikely that there's anything; he is hoping there isn't. That's his preference, not to feel anything again, not to be alive, not to be anything but a small blur in a photo.

The boxes look untidy. "It doesn't matter," he tells himself but deep down it does, because no soldier's boxes should look untidy. John unpacks the lot and re-packs, pushing and folding different items until every thing is neat, every thing fits.

There are two noted exceptions to the packing - his computer (which will fit on top of the smaller box) and the Sig, which obviously he will need on Saturday night.

He slumps back against the wall and looks at his phone. 8.16pm. In 48 hours I should be dead. 

Three down, two to go.


	16. Chapter 16

"The question is why."

Sherlock is on his belly in front of the fridge, armed with a wire coat hanger.

There's no time to sleep and no time to eat. Sherlock's mind is whirring, processing possibilities and theories and discarding them at the rate of knots.

His progress, however, has been seriously hindered by his misplaced phone which is still cheeping to itself under his fridge.

Detective Inspector Lestrade is sitting at Sherlock's kitchen table, privately congratulating himself for having found the one unutilised area on which he could have his lunch. The rest of the table is covered with beakers, Petri dishes, dead matches, random splotches of red gunk that may or may not be human tissue, piles of papers, a couple of small pharmaceutical bottles filled with various volumes of clear fluids and in the centre, exactly as they currently figure in Sherlock's brain, four broken beer bottles.

"How did your phone even get under the fridge?" Lestrade wonders.

"There was an explosion," Sherlock half grunts in to the warm dank blackness.

"Nothing's ever straight forward with you, is it? Anybody else would just drop their phone accidently and it would slide under the fridge. Not you. You have to have an explosion."

"Oh do shut up."

Lestrade sniggers as he eats his sandwich (roast lamb and salad on thick white bread, no butter but lots of mustard) and continues.

"The thing that interests me most", and he pauses just in time to delicately remove a small piece of gristle from the sandwich, "is that there's a female victim too. Makes you wonder who exactly he's killing. Does he know them, or just know about them? You know, like a hired killer."

Sherlock grunts some more. The hanger keeps getting caught in the fridge's mechanics and his phone remains tantalisingly out of reach.

"Of course he knows them. How else would he get them to the places where he kills them? Oh!  
I've got it! Oh. Bugger. No, I haven't." 

"What? Got what?"

Sherlock is still for a brief second. It's exhausting, conversing with an idiot (albeit one of whom he is very fond) and trying to wrangle a phone from such an awkward place with a coat hanger at the same time.

"My phone. I nearly had it but it slipped. He kills them because he knows them." He re-adjusts his hold on the hanger and goes back in, gently, patiently.

"Do you want me to have a go?"

"What? Solving a crime? No, that would be disastrous." 

"You're hilarious. Your phone. Here. Let me."

And the Detective Inspector lies down on the floor next to Sherlock. They both peer in at the phone.

A thin vapour of Coty's Emaurade winds into the kitchen.

"Oh, look at you two playing snakes. My nephews used to love that game!"

Mrs Hudson is delivering a few groceries she has kindly picked up for her entirely irresponsible tenant. "I'll leave these on the table for you, Sherlock. Don't forget to put the milk and butter in the fridge."

"Thank you Mrs Hudson," he grunts under the fridge.

"What are you two doing down there?"

The both speak a the same time. "Trying to get Sherlock's phone out," says the Detective Inspector. "Playing snakes," says Sherlock.

She hears only the correct statement, puts her other bags on the floor and crouches down next to them. "Here, get out the way, both of you, let me have a go."

"You're too slender, Mrs Hudson. If you slip in under we'll never get you out." 

"Oh, you," she laughs. "Here, give me the hanger."

The men move out of the way and look at each other with half smirks that dissipate very quickly when the phone slides out in seconds.

"Got it!" she says triumphantly.

It's hard to tell what is making Sherlock happier - Mrs Hudson or his phone.

"Mrs Hudson! Once again you have improved the quality of my life immeasurably. I can't thank you enough."

"You silly boy. But here, you'll have to change your shirt. Those tiles are a bit grimy, aren't they?" She looks as pristine as ever but both Sherlock and Lestrade do indeed have thin grey smears on their shirt.

Lestrade goes back to the office where he keeps a change of shirts; Sherlock wanders around the kitchen table with his shirt half on, half off, carefully cleaning the greasy face of his phone with a little rubbing alcohol dabbed on the free sleeve while he wonders how the Broken Beer Bottle Killer knows his victims. And why they have tattoos of inverted phone numbers on their arms.

And why and why and why. He stares at his phone with knotted eyebrows.

I'm going about this the wrong way, he tells his phone. I need to walk backwards through this. 

He takes a good breath and focuses.

Why do people keep records of phone numbers?

Because if we don't, we can't remember them.

Why do the victims need to remember their phone numbers? Why aren't they in their phones? 

The numbers might be.

So why can't they remember their number by checking their phones? 

Because they can't access the phones.

Why?

Because they don't have them. 

Who does?

The phones' owner.

And a beautiful yellow light shines over the whole problem. He gives his now gleaming phone a wild smile and punches a rapid text to Lestrade.

He's their boss. He's killing his employees.  
SH

 

Chapter 16.5

I have a head but it is blonde.   
Molly

No good. It needs to have hair like me.  
SH

Okay. Will keep looking.  
Molly

I want you to start signing your name with a capital letter. You're NOT a common noun.  
SH

Thank you.  
Molly


	17. Chapter 17

"Beakley!"

 

John, who used to be able to insert canulas in low light relying primarily on his sense of touch, is enjoying a large cup of too-hot coffee on his second last day. His hand is relatively still and his leg doesn't feel too bad.

And he has a list:

o Call in sick  
o Bird??  
o Buy cat cage  
o Buy roast chicken o Rhonda -> hospital o Long walk  
o Die

He is standing in the blissfully quiet kitchen, taking mouthfuls of coffee while he checks his itemized list. A few minutes ago he spoke to Michelle at reception and told her some plausible story about having a virus.

She had been very sweet . You stay home and get better, she had said kindly. And don't worry about meeting me at the hospital, I'll come and pick you up tomorrow. No, it's fine, it's the least I can do. Everyone at Nan's hospital is so excited about the new cat. You take care.

I am a fraud, John says to himself with no evident concern as he ticks the first item off his list with a swift stroke. I am a fraud.

He's just about to start worrying about the bird when a text comes through on his phone: 

I think you have my bird. I saw your sign on the pole. Do you still have it

Yes, I do. Can I return him to you? 

Okay. When can you come

Now?

No I work. Can you come this afternoon. 

Sure.

 

Which gives him a couple of hours to walk down to the High Street and pick up some things for Rhonda.

***

John's standing at the door of a house just four doors down to road. He's holding a shoe box

that he stole from Charlotte's room and lined with newspaper and punched with tiny holes before filling it with the little African Love Bird.

The bird sits resolutely in corner of the box. He has an idea what's coming.

There's a huge brass knocker cast in the shape of a lion flush in the middle of the door and small black door bell to the right.

John takes the lion. 

Nothing happens.

He taps the lion more emphatically. 

Still nothing.

He presses the buzzer and the door opens in four seconds by a young woman in jeans and a fleece. Her uncombed hair is piled on her head and secured with a slightly tatty coloured band. Small shapeless strands spring out from various parts of her crown.

"Are you the bird man?" she asks wearily.

John instantly thinks of Burt Lancaster and smiles politely. "I'm the man who found your bird, yes."

She sighs. "Come in, then."

John doesn't feel very welcome.

The house is large and littered with abundant evidence of children - pieces of Lego, plastic cars, a half naked Barbie with small scribbles of coloured biro on her face, DVD covers and lots of small coloured trainers.

"Wait here," the weary mother says. "I'll get the cage. DANIEL! DANIEL! THE MAN WITH YOUR BIRD'S HERE!"

John hears small thumps and a couple of squeals, then a collection of hurried footsteps approaching from different parts of the house.

In a couple of moments John is being watched by five children, all with identical cautious brown eyes. The youngest he guesses to be three, the oldest is probably ten or 11.

No wonder the mistress of the house is tired.

"Hello," he says to the gathered crowd but there is no response.

He's glad when the weary mother returns. She's holding a large cage in one hand a packet of birdseed in the other and dumps both on the floor.

"He lives in here," says one of the younger children. 

Because no one makes any attempt to take the box from him, John crouches down in front of the cage and opens the box.

The little African Love Bird sits forlornly in the corner of the box and doesn't look up.

John freezes for a second. Suddenly it seems like the cruellest thing in the world, to take a creature capable of flight and trap it in a cage. His heart is like wet cement in his chest but he has to keep going; each child watches as he gently lifts the little bird out of the box and feels those tiny little claws again, cups it in both hands and carefully puts him back in the cage.

"Beakley!" a couple of the little kids cry.

And the little bird hops up on to one of the bars and just sits, back to John as the cage door is locked behind him.

"And we're done." John struggles to keep his voice normal as he stands up. He wonders where they'll put the cage.

"Yeah, so thanks for that," the mother says in a sigh.

"You're welcome." The kids are crowding around the cage as he walks to the door and waves with a half raised hand. "Bye."

No one answers.

It was just a bird, John says to himself as he walks home. Stop this. Stop this. It was just a bird. It couldn't have survived outside the cage. It's perfectly all right.

But it isn't. His misery seems to be rising, a horrible cold current of ill will and black skies and a promise that nothing will ever be good again.

It grows stronger as he walks, pulling him under when he opens the front door and driving him straight to his own room where it slams him on the floor, back against the wall and he finally breaks down completely, huge thick sodden sobs from every chamber of his heart that won't stop.

Chapter 17.5

I've got you a head! It has hair exactly like yours.  
Molly

Good work! I'll collect it tomorrow afternoon.  
SH


	18. Chapter 18

"Their boss?"

 

Sherlock is looking very smart in a clean teal shirt and a navy Kilgour suit. He is standing in  
Lestrade's office, speaking with outstretched emphatic hands, as if he might reach out and drag Lestrade through his most recent deductions.

"This has to be a drug syndicate of come kind. The victims don't have the phone that corresponds to the number on their arm - their boss does. All the inquiries from people wanting drugs go through to those numbers and he contacts the dealers to distribute."

"Yeah but how is he calling them?" 

"On their own personal phones." 

"We haven't found their phones."

Sherlock looks at him hopefully, expecting the penny drop any moment.

It is silent. Lestrade shrugs his shoulders a little, holds his palms out. "So where are their personal phones?"

Sherlock's eyes are wild. He cannot fathom how the most obvious things appear as clouds to the rest of the world.

"HE TAKES THEM WITH HIM WHEN HE KILLS THEM."

"Wait. Let me get this. He has phones for each of them, and those phones correspond with the numbers on their arms.”

"Yes. Keep going."

"People call those numbers to order drugs." 

"Yes."

"He then calls the dealers on their own phones to set up delivery." "Yes. Think of it as a kind of mobile phone switchboard."

"Wait. Why does he kill them?"

Sherlock sails in to full blown diva. "I don't know! Maybe they don't generate enough business. Maybe they don't make enough money. Maybe - oh!" Sherlock's stills mid flight as the probable cause emerges from the shadows and he swings around in a full circle. "That's it!"

Lestrade hates this part, when Sherlock works it out and then flies out the door. 

"Sherlock!"

He pokes his head back in the door. "Where are those phone transcripts?" 

"Electronic boffin's sick. But hang on - tell me. What's it?"

"Money!"

And Sherlock flies off to find his dealer.


	19. Chapter 19

"You sure I can't tempt you?"

 

Sherlock is looking out the window of Pret-A-Mange in Piccadilly, drinking mediocre cappuccino from a cardboard cup. The foamy milk leaves an irritating fatty film on his lips which no amount of licking seems to remove.

He sits next to a man wearing loose jeans, floral sneakers, a white shirt and a very heavy orange jumper that needs some serious laundry. Sherlock knows him as Bob. He doesn't like Bob much, mostly because Bob has some insight into Sherlock that very few people achieve. Still, he is generous with his services, keeps a wide range of interesting merchandise and offers excellent credit options.

Bob is drinking peppermint tea and being very circumspect in his responses to Sherlock's careful questions.

"So what I'm saying, basically, is that every dealer expects their foot soldiers to rip them off a bit. Ten quid here, five quid there - it doesn't matter. Probably wouldn't even notice it, actually."

Sherlock is wiping his mouth again with a paper serviette. His mouth feels tacky with imaginary foam.

"What would they notice?"

Bob shrugs. "Depends on the boss. If he's got a habit himself - and you know a lot of them are very fond of cocaine- he's going to be paranoid."

"Obviously." Sherlock glares into his coffee cup. So much milk saturated with so much air, so little actual coffee. "I need to know what would actually set him off."

"Is this about those kids getting killed with beer bottles?" 

"I'm asking hypothetically."

"Yeah, I read about that." 

"And?"

"And I thought it was a pity."

"Of course it's a pity. I need to know what they may have done to provide a motive for their death."

"Well, there's lots of variables."

Sherlock wants to throw the remaining coffee all over Bob. "So tell me," he says with a rigid jaw.  
"Well, if the boss wasn't a user, I'd say they were working together and doing some serious skimming, you know, like in the hundreds or even thousands, depending on how much they were selling."

"And if he was a user?"

The dealer laughs. "They wouldn't have to do anything. You know how paranoid you can get." 

"Indeed." Sherlock looks down in to the foam. About 225 separate bubbles, he surmises, at  
least on the surface. 

"What do you think?"

"If I had any idea I wouldn't be here drinking this coffee-stained milk drink." He reaches over and tosses the cup into the large bin. "Good to see you again, Bob. Give my love to your family."

"Will do," says Bob, who still lives at home with his parents. "Before you go, can I help you with any medicinal needs? I have some excellent hashish oil from a lovely little place down near the equator. I can give you a" -

"Bye Bob." Sherlock, never one for sedatives, is already out the door. Bob watches the handsome navy suit disappear into the crowds.


	20. Chapter 20

"I think you're the only person I'm going to miss, and you're not even a person."

 

John, who used to think he would retire from the army aged fifty and come home to set up his own practice in suburban London, is about to start moving into Sherlock's radar.

On this cold Friday night, with just under nine miles between them, John is trying to rouse himself from the floor.

Rhonda is assisting. She started by politely batting his arm. When this had no effect, she stood up on her hind legs, steadied herself with one paw against his against his elbow and reached up to bat his face.

"What," he said in a dull voice, hardly turning his face.

She batted him again. Captain, I'm hungry. I have no thumbs. I think there 's a cooked chicken in the kitchen. Could you help?

"I'm just so tired of everything," he tells her.

You know Captain, you smell a bit like that coloured bird I gave you. Did you cook it?

"I must be the only man in the world who is literally bored to death by living a normal life."

Rhonda bats him again. There's only one cure for that, Captain. Let's have some food. 

John folds his arms around his knees and rests his face on the muscly forearms.

"I'm taking you to the hospital tomorrow. You'll have a real job and lots of friends. They're all to old to have sex so you won't have to worry about that. They'll all like you and you can sleep on their beds all day." He reaches out and strokes her soft coat.

She tolerates his mindless stroking for a few seconds before batting him again. Its way past my meal time, Captain. Chop chop.

Rhonda, who was born in a car park and rescued by a council worker before being adopted through an ad placed in a vet's window, had all her cat dreams come true when John eventually carried her to the kitchen and placed before her an entire roast chicken.

"I want you to remember me fondly," he says.

She looks at it along time before starting tentatively on the left drumstick.

***

On Saturday morning, while Sherlock is pacing his flat in his pyjamas trying to work out why he hasn't caught the Broken Beer Bottle Killer, John is carefully preparing the cat cage.

Rhonda is still mauling the chicken. It has exceeded her expectations of everything in this life.

A little later she curls up in an immobile circle on the lounge room floor, which makes it very easy for John to sneak up and lift her gently into the cage. She's instantly furious and her loud, frightened miaows snag his heart. Captain! What the jiggering fuck! Why am I in a cage, Captain? Get me out of here now! That's an order!

He lays down on the floor to talk to her.

"It's only for a while, and then you'll be in a fantastic hospital where you can walk wherever you want and everyone will love you." She's not convinced and miaows louder. Out of here NOW, Captain!

John gets up slowly. His leg is not so sore, but oddly enough his shoulder - which usually isn't more than a dull ache when he exerts it - aches with a jagged pain today. He rubs it absently as he heads back to his room, Rhonda calling after him.

Organised as ever, he's laid out the few items he'll carry with him: one hundred and twenty pounds in notes, his GMC card in one back pocket and his Army warrant in the other, his gun, disengaged for the time being and tucked down the back of his trousers.

He packs his deflated wallet, phone and laptop in the larger box. 

And now he can tick off everything from his list.

While John surveys the few boxes in the empty room that make up his all his worldly possessions, Sherlock is in the shower, standing on one leg with water beating down on his shoulders as he tries once again to fit all his toes in the tap. It bothers him enormously that not all of them fit properly. He makes a post it note about a tap with a bigger spout and whacks it on a low wall in the mind palace.

***

Michelle is on time and, John thinks, surprisingly pretty in a pink jumper. She's always neat, Michelle, neat and tidy and blemish free. She looks a little unreal to John. Her hair shines naturally, her skin is clear, her smile is wide and shows straight rows of even teeth, but there's no quirk, and therefore no challenge. John likes her a lot because she doesn't attract him one iota.

Rhonda wails on the back seat as they drive down to Highgate where the nanas live in the care facility that currently has no cat. Michelle and John do admirably well at pained small talk; each is very relieved when they get to the hospital.

Rhonda, not so much.

Sherlock, meanwhile, is trying to weigh the disembodied head Molly found for him. It's not as easy as he thought.

"Sit still," he tells the head for the fourth time as it rolls across the table. The half closed eyes are cloudy and downward cast and its heavy lips are gaping slightly. The tongue is pushed back well behind the teeth; Sherlock wonders if Molly perhaps pinned it in place. He stops and thinks about that for a few seconds, forgets the scales and starts fossicking in the cold mouth with careful fingers.

John is nodding with affable concord at the Head of Therapy who will supervise Rhonda at the hospital. Rhonda is swearing at her, John, Michelle and anyone else within earshot.

"It's so hard to find the right kind of cat for a place like this," the Head of Therapy says over the yowling. "Young cats are too skittish, old cats need too much care."

John is thinking about lying still in a quiet place somewhere. An abandoned factory would be good.

The Head of Therapy and Michelle are both looking at John, waiting for a response. He feels like he's receiving them in faint waves. "I think Rhonda will fit in perfectly," is the best he can come up with.

The handover is drawing to a close. Michelle is keen to visit Nana, John is keen to get the last excruciating detail of his life over and done with.  
"Well, good luck with her," he says finally. "Thanks for the lift, Michelle, I guess I'll see you on Monday."

"Yeah, bye John, thanks again!"

John bites his lip and taps the cage gently. Quick and sharp, like a bandaid, he tells himself. "Bye Rhonda. Be nice to the residents."

He turns and walks away, eyes stinging and biting his lip so hard he draws blood.  
She yowls loudly. No! Don't leave me here! Come back! There better not be any bloody warlocks here, Captain! Come back!

So John cuts his last tie with his life and walks out to the large gate, dry eyed now and quite

focused, and turns left onto the main road.

Sherlock is about 7 miles away. 

 

Chapter 20.5  
Some time ago, Sherlock nailed this to the wall in another empty room in his mind palace before he left and closed the door:

Things I would like in a friend   
Luminous  
Or at least a conductor of light   
Likes the violin  
Talks with me   
Likes experiments   
Sense of humour   
Bravery  
Can use a firearm

 

Chapter 20.75.  
There's been another one 

Where?  
SH

44 essingdon lane putney can you come 

What's different? Why are you inviting me?  
SH

it's fresh killer was disturbed 

Be there in 20 minutes.  
SH


	21. Chapter 21

"Are you alright?"

 

John, who once extracted a bullet from a screaming man with only one scalpel, some broken  
forceps, a local anaesthetic and a tank of oxygen, has wandered the streets of London for nearly six hours. He has crossed the suicide bridge over Archway Road, pausing briefly to look through the wire at the City and at the streams of traffic below, struggled through the Saturday crowds of Camden, sat on the edge of a seat on the 34 bus, walked alongside Hyde Park and over to Bayswater Road, through to Marble Arch and along the tailbone of Oxford Street.

It grows dark and his time is near.

He still has no idea where he will sit down for the last time but at the moment he thinking about St Barts, where he trained all those years ago. It depends, John decides, on whether they still have that dark quiet area near the rear car park.

His feet are hurting but his hands are remarkably still and his leg feels great. The cane is almost redundant. He's tempted to just drop it in the gutter but part of him wants it found alongside his body, partly because he's been using it for so long now and it feels like part of his landscape, and partly because it helps provide a reason for why he's leaving early.

I'm a cripple. I'm broken. I wanted to die.

He turns left into Gloucester Place. It's quiet and the trees are strangely beautiful in the false white street light. John hears a noise ahead of him, a friendly, cheerful noise and sees a group of young people milling around a car. He hates them all instantly and ducks down Portman Street.

It leads to Baker Street which in turn will take him through to Regents Park. John taps the gun tucked in at the small of his back affectionately. Not far to go.

He blinks and tilts his head as a headlight burns his eye for a second. It's a scooter, something plexiglass and light, and it clips a man who is rushing out of a doorway to cross the street and the man trips, falls face first and cries out or swears.

John rushes over to him without thinking.  
"Easy," he says to the man who is a little dazed, lifting his head and turning his face to John. Blood streams down the stranger's face in a sheet, for the impact with the asphalt has split the skin

from temple to earlobe.

It all comes so naturally. "I'm a doctor," John says calmly, leaning over the stranger and gently trying to keep him still. "You're going to be fine. I just want to check your face."

"I'm alright," the injured man says rudely but it comes out as a whoosh and a soft bouquet of blood droplets that fall in a mist across John's jumper.

"It's okay, you've bitten your tongue. Okay, no, don't get up, let me just check you've not broken anything. I'll get an ambulance - " and then he remembers he has no phone.

The adrenalin is subsiding and the stranger can feel the first streaks of pain as the cold air hits the open wound and everywhere else - he's scraped his hand, knocked his elbow a little and bumped his knee. He lets John hold his face with careful fingers and look closely at the cut.

"You need stitches," he says firmly.

The stranger gathers all the blood he can in his mouth and swallows heavily. 

"No ambulanth," he says.

John smiles at the temporary lisp. It's rather endearing. "Right. No ambulanth. But I need to get you to the hospital."

The stranger reaches into his coat with a halting movements and produces a large bandana.

"Ah, good," says John, and folds it into a long thick pad that will have to do until they can get some proper gauze. He presses it carefully along the cut, takes the stranger's hand and positions it carefully to hold it in place.

"Okay?"

The stranger nods. He's busy collecting data.  
A familiar yellow light on a lumbering black cab is heading towards them; John stretches out his arm and whistles loudly and distinctly.

He crouches before the stranger again and takes both his arms. "Can you stand up for me?"

The stranger grunts and looks very closely at John's face. It's as if, John would think later, he was cataloguing me.

"I'm alright," the stranger says, but he steadies himself against John and is a little wobbly on his feet for a second or two.

John is patient, takes the stranger by the good elbow and shepherds him into the cab. "We're going to St Bart's, thanks," he tells the driver.

The stranger distils the most pertinent aspects of his current dilemma into as few words as possible. "I'm in a hurry,"

John turns his face calmly and nods. "I'll have you in and out of there in 75 minutes." And he smiles. The stranger stares.

They don't speak for a while. John looks out the window, working out how he can do this. He knows Bart's back to front. Accident and Emergency on a Saturday night, even this early, will be hectic and mostly staffed by agency nurses and doctors. On a Saturday night there would be very few regular staff. An unfamiliar doctor won't register with anyone.

All John needs is white coat and a bit of gumption.

Meanwhile the stranger is flicking his eyes over John and filing everything.

When they get close to the hospital, John fishes a twenty pound note from his pocket and turns to the stranger again. "Okay, you're going to have fib a bit."

"To whom?"

"The front desk and the triage nurse. So I need you to hold onto your heart like this" - and John clutches the left side of his chest - "and tell them you've got pains in your chest. Okay?"

The patient is interested to see where this is going, gives him the smallest of his most natural

smiles and nods. There are tiny crusts of blood at either side of his lips.

John tosses the 20 pound note to the driver, doesn't wait for change and again steers the stranger by the elbow towards the front desk, who send him straight to the Triage desk.

The Triage nurse is at the end of his shift. The bleeding man with chest pains will probably be his last patient tonight.

"Name?" the nurse asks wearily.

"Sherlock Holmeth," he says with a tiny splatter of blood. "I have cheth pains." 

Sherlock? John wonders at the name. No one is called Sherlock.

The nurse looks up for the first time.

"He was hit by a scooter," John explains. 

"Are you his partner?"

John thinks for a second. "Yes." and then he remembers something that all partners do when their mate is in trouble. "Is he going to be alright?"

Sherlock hasn't flinched. This is brilliant, he thinks happily.

"I'll need to get him into ER so we can do an ECG," the nurse says, quite determined to let the bleeding man with chest pains and his partner in the questionable jumper be someone else's problem. "I'll just a get a wheelchair."

Sherlock's face grows instantly aggrieved. "It's just for a second, " John whispers. "They'll hook you up for an ECG and as soon as they see there's no problem they'll drop you way down the list and leave you. Anyway, it'll take them at least an hour to find an the cardiology registrar this time on a Saturday night. I'll be in five minutes."

As Sherlock is wheeled away John calls out to him with true concern. "I'm just out here!" 

Sherlock rolls his eyes.

The waiting room is full of tired, unwell people. They are not John's problem at this moment, although he feels like he's on a bit of a roll now and would very much like to check each and everyone, to be certain that there are no cases that should be rushed through triage.

It's nearly 7 o'clock: meal time for the staff. John waits and watches the triage nurse and as soon as he sees him packing up moves towards his office. He slips in, around to the corridor where they wheeled Sherlock away. There are a couple of treating rooms to the side and in one - bingo - John sees two white coats are hanging on a hook. He picks one up nimbly as he passes, slipping it on as he walks so when he walks into the ward no one gives him a second glance.

It looks different from his day but it's busy, like accident and emergency wards are always busy. Moans and sharp shrieks are coming from all directions, intercepted with dull beeping noises from drips or monitors. Two nurses are seemingly arguing at the nurses' station, a doctor rushes past, heading in the direction of an unseen female patient who is screaming behind a curtain at the end of the corridor and over there is an older doctor in blood smeared scrubs - undoubtedly, thinks John, the house surgeon.

John looks casually over the file rack but there are no patient notes for Sherlock yet. One either side of him there are rows of cubicles, each shielded by a heavy, hospital-blue curtain. He has to take a good guess.

John turns left.

Each cubicle has hastily scrawled name in fixed to the metal frames in a perspex holder: Walker, Singh, O'Donnell, Brackett, Canturi, Ahmed and then a blank one. John looks moves the curtain carefully, sees an old woman sleeping and moves on. The names continue - Porter, Bureau, Higgins, Davies and another blank one.

This time he finds Sherlock in a blue hospital gown trussed up in a series of complicated leads

being tended by a nurse as slight as a sparrow. The patient sits on the edge of the bed and his feet almost touch the floor.

"Mr Holmes," John says convincingly.

"Just finished here, doctor," the nurse says as she hands John a thin file. "Patient has been hit by a scooter, has a bad cut on his head and says he has chest pains."

"Ah. Then I'll need a suture trolley," John says to no one in particular.

The nurse, who has just started her shift, nods. "I saw one just a second ago - hang on." 

John carefully adjusts the curtains so no one can see in.

He looks at the nuclear green graphs on the ECG machine, "Well, the good news is, your heart is healthy."

"Sixthy nine minuteth," Sherlock says. 

"Show me your tongue."

Sherlock dips out enough tongue so John can see the tiny cut. "That will heal very quickly if you rest it for a few minutes," he suggests.

Sherlock puts his tongue back and twists his mouth as if he's considering the suggestion.

The curtain swings back and it's the nurse, pushing a trolley filled with an assortment of gauzes, tapes, canulas and fearsome steel implements. John gives her a bright smile. "Thanks for that!"

He looks through the contents of the trolley, going over a mental list so well worn that it comes to him like a poem he's memorised. It's only missing a couple of things.

"Okay. I have to scrub up and get some iodine. Don't go away."

"Sixthy eight minuteth." Sherlock counts by seconds while he pilfers a small assortment of canulas. Always handy to have a couple on hand.

And then John's back with a big brown bottle and powdery gloves on his hands.

"Sixthy sixth minuteth."

The doctor wastes no time unfolding sterile packs of gauze, laying out the driving and suture needle, tipping a pool of iodine into a small plastic dish. The wound is a perfect split and won't need to be trimmed. John dances his fingertips gently along the edge of the trauma and feels tiny specks of gravel at its open seams. He squirts it with a large syringe of saline four times.

"Cold?" he asks his patient. 

"Are you really a doctor?"

John laughs gently as he paints wide amber stripes of iodine over the cut. "Yes." Just saying that makes him happier than he's been in months.

"Afghanithtan or Iraq?"

John stops mid-swab and steps back slightly. "Sorry?" 

"Afghanithtan or Iraq?"

For a moment he can barely answer. "Afghanistan. How could you possibly know that?"

Sherlock looks at him calmly. "I can thee your dog tagth." He takes a breath, about to ask questions associated with the more important deductions and observations he's made, but decides he needs to be stitched first. "Sixthy two minutes."

John's uses the nail of his middle finger to flick a skinny syringe fitted with a mosquito thin needle.

"I don't need a local." 

"Are you a doctor too?"

Sherlock weighs up his chances. "No."

"Little pin prick," and John drains the syringe on the left side of the wound.

"Oh. You really are a doctor."

John looks down and see's Sherlock is reading his GMC card. He pats his back pocket, looks at the card again.

"Did you pickpocket me?"

Sherlock lifts his chin, defiant, waiting for the tedious angry rebuke. but John's delighted. 

"You're a pickpocket?"

"No. I jutht KNOW how to pickpocket. There's a vatht difference." 

"That's pretty impressive!"

Sherlock regards the doctor with cobra eyes. No one has ever appreciated his skills so openly.

John stares back, reaching into his other pocket and pulling out his Army warrant. "Let me save you any further trouble. “That's all the id I've got, unless you want my money too. Now sit still while I give you a bit more anaesthetic."

Sherlock reads the cards carefully. Captain. Doctor. Blood group A. Roman Catholic. 15 May 1972. He feels the small leather wallets they're kept in, runs his thumb over the stitching, smells the smooth worn backs.

John, who's starting to rather like this odd ball, moves across the room to grab the lamp with the long extender neck so he can illuminate the wound. His white coat and jacket catch a little on the trolley.

Sherlock catches a quick glimpse of the Sig; his data gathering is complete and ready for harvesting.

Red rimmed eyes, heavy bags under his eyes. Not sleeping. Depressed. Weeping. Skin is slack, so not eating much either. Clothes are clean and cared for, so he's working, living somewhere with a laundry. There's cat hair on his trousers, one or two on his jumper. Has a pet, so living somewhere settled. No wallet, no phone. Why go out without either, yet carry his medical and army id?

"Are you angry at thomeone?"

John is carefully threading the dacron and doesn't look up. "No. Why?" 

"Where were you going tonight?"

"I'm going to start. You'll feel a little tug. Tell me if it hurts."

Sherlock waits for the little tug. 58 minutes. His doctor could well make this. 

"Where were you going?"

"I was just walking. Why? Where were you going?" "To catch a murderer."

"Really?"

"Yeth." Sherlock closes his eye as the dull glint of the suture needle passes close by. 

"Which one?"

"The Broken Beer Bottle Killer."

John had seen this on the front pages in the last week. He nods affably. 

"Are you a police officer?" He feels Sherlock's neck stiffen.

"I'm a conthulting detective."

"Oh, Scotland yard?" He's knotting the first stitch. 

"Abtholutely not."

"Who do you work for?" 

"I work for my thelf."

"So who consults you?" 

"Loth of people."

"I've never heard of a consulting detective."

"No. You wouldn't have. I'm the only one in the world. Tho where were you going tonight?" 

John is closing the second stitch. "Does it matter?"

"I think it matters enormouthly." Sherlock feels the gentle fingers move a little further down his face. He's not been this close to any person for any purpose in years, except when he kissed his parents. Which doesn't count. John smells like freshly cut wood.

"It doesn't. I was just walking. How are you coping?" 

"Perfectly."

"You're very calm."

"So what exactly are you doing tonight?"

John shakes his head as he closes the third stitch. "Nothing special. Your tongue seems to be getting better. "

"Hmm. So you're an army doctor?" Sherlock watches John closely when he asks this. 

"I was, yes."

"You must have seen a lot of trauma. How long were you there?" 

"Seven, eight years. I saw a lot of trouble, yes."

"A lot of trauma, handled a lot of medical emergencies." 

"Every day."

"Your family must be glad to have you home." Sherlock is fairly certain there is no family to speak of but asks so he can gauge John's reaction.

"I only have a sister and I haven't seen her since I got back." John snicks the tail on the fourth stitch and leans back to inspect his handiwork. "Probably another three. How am I doing for time?"

"Brilliantly. What are you going to do after this?"

"I'm going to have to give you a shot of penicillin, and I think you should have a tetanus shot too."

"That's not what I'm asking. I had a tetanus shot two years ago. You only need them every ten years."

"Oh, so you are a doctor," John says with a little smile.

"No, but I know I know I don't need tetanus. I'll take the penicillin though. What are -" but Sherlock is interrupted by a young resident medico with a pained expression.  
"Doctor, can I check something with you?"

John looks up and smiles. "Can you talk while I'm doing this? I need to get this patient stitched quickly."

The resident will take any crumbs he can get and talks haltingly about an older male patient who has non-specific abdominal pain and severe swelling. The resident thinks it's kidney stones.

"Sounds like his appendix," John decides without looking up. He's knotting the sixth stitch. "Have you done an ultrasound?"

The resident hasn't and he's grateful for the guidance.

"Well, do one! I need to get this patient some penicillin. Can you see it on the trolley?" 

The resident is brisk and efficient and finds the right vial in seconds.

"Thank you, Doctor."

"Thank you, sir!" the resident says, and he rushes back to his patient.

Sherlock adds this important interaction to his cache of John material: He helps, and then he lets the person he helps return the favour. Emotional intelligence -this man has lots. Why then is planning to shoot himself? Why isn't he seeking some help?

Sherlock tries a sixth time.

"What are you doing after this?" 

"You're a curious bugger, aren't you?"

"Yes. I'm also certain that you're thinking of doing yourself great harm."

John has just threaded the final suture. He stops for a minute, closes his lips tight and turns his face slightly. He doesn't know what to say so Sherlock keeps talking.

"Keep stitching. What you do is your own business. But if you are, wait a few hours and come with me while I catch a murderer. It'll be interesting." And something important occurs to him so he elaborates. "Dangerous and interesting."

John wonders how his patient could know his plans. He's embarrassed and stammers slightly, but no words are available to him. He's about to explain that he wouldn't know what to do but he doesn't have to, Sherlock's already there.

"You could observe and give me your opinions. It would be helpful. Police crime scene specialists are appalling. I've always wanted an assistant. An army doctor who's used to gore would be a very helpful addition. Besides, I like the company. It's helpful to think out loud."

John is closing the last stitch. It's a lot to take in, so instead he steps back to observe his handiwork and for a tiny second is thrilled with the neatness and speed of his work. He's missed all it so much. "I just have to dress this."

"So you were going to commit some serious self harm?" 

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Where are you working at the moment?" 

"Praxton Pharmaceuticals."

Sherlock's aqua eyes light up. "Do you get free samples?" 

John shakes his head. "I work in the admin side."

"You're not practising medicine? Why?"

"I've been invalided. I wasn't good to practise."  
"What garbage. I bet some cow-eyed double-speak therapist told you that."

John laughs bitterly. "No, she told me I had trust issues. The army told me that I couldn't practise. They were right. I have tremors in my right hand and ..." his voice trails off a bit. He doesn't want to discuss his flaws with this interesting stranger who might be forming a good opinion of him.

Sherlock can see this and tosses him a lifeline. "You're fine to practice." He watches how carefully John prepares the dressing, how carefully he applies it to the slightly throbbing wound. "Are you living alone?"  
"No. A share house." 

"Ugh. With idiots?"

John laughs despite himself. "With a lawyer and a warlock who never stop copulating."

Sherlock actually shudders. "No wonder you're depressed. Come with me. It can't be any worse. You can always attend to your - issues - afterwards."

John doesn't answer but Sherlock can feel him thinking about it, can see in his face that he wants to. Sometimes people swim out and wait for the tide to pull them under, sometimes they drift out and hope to God someone notices in time.


	22. Chapter 22

"He's with me."

 

Sherlock, who has never had a friend in his life, is walking with John in tow towards a long tail of police crime scene tape suspended across the street .

He is confident in his stride but a tiny bit anxious. He wants John to see him at his best but knows he has few allies here.

John is more reserved, His hands in tucked deep in his jacket pockets and although he looks calm, he's not sure what he's actually doing. His mind is entirely alert and his body's pain free.

"Hello Freak," a slim young woman sings out when they reach the tape. "What are you doing here?"

"Good evening, Sergeant Donovan. I was invited by Detective Inspector Lestrade." 

"What happened to your face? Did someone finally punch you?"

Sherlock ignores her and starts lifting the tape, standing to one side so John can enter too. 

"Hang on! Who's this?" She turns to John. "Who are you? Did he follow you home?"

John doesn't know what to say. He doesn't want to draw attention to himself, doesn't want to argue. Sherlock, however, has no reservations about doing either.

"He's with me, Detective Donovan. If you have a problem with that, take it up with Detective Inspector Lestrade who invited me here."

He bickers with her for a few seconds. John is quite fascinated by her rudeness and impressed with Sherlock's complete indifference to it. Detective Donovan is snarky but starts to concede; Sherlock loses interest and waits for John to enter too. Detective Donovan announces his arrival into her radio.

"Oh you," says a tall beaky looking man with nasty little eyes who's standing at the main doorway. "Should have guessed you'd be here."

"Good evening, Anderson." Sherlock pushes past him and John follows, looking down. 

"It's a crime scene and I don't want it contaminated," Anderson calls after him.

Sherlock pays no attention.

John wonders why no one is happy to see them.

The house is like the others Sherlock had visited. It's abandoned and clearly served as shelter for lots of groups of disaffected people. John can see graffiti sprayed over graffiti, empty fast food packaging, various dirt encrusted spoons and syringes, the occasional shoe, a couple of grubby unidentifiable garments, random pieces of newspaper and there, at the end of what had once been a hall, a tallish man with kind dark eyes wearing a disposable suit and holding a lamp.

"Sherlock. Glad you could make it. You've cut your face? Who's he?" 

"Detective Inspector. It's perfectly alright. He's with me."

"I can see that, but who is he?" 

"He's with me.”

The Detective Inspector is too harassed to press Sherlock any further and hands John a disposable suit. "I can give you five minutes."

John starts to pull on the suit without any question. Sherlock waits. 

"Aren't you going to wear one?" John wonders.

Sherlock looks at him like he's asked for his kidney. He slips a pair of latex gloves over his hands as they walk to the dark cold room where the latest young person has died.

"How did you find her?"

"Someone phoned it in. We think it was the person who disturbed the killer."

Lestrade holds the lamp high and spotlights a young woman in a pool of blood. John looks away with a heavy heart.

She's in a slightly different position than the other four; it seems she hasn't collapsed as quickly as the others had. Her body is twisted; one hand clutches at the ground and the other is flung out behind her as if she tried to turn around and look up at something.

"She's been stabbed differently," Sherlock says. "She didn't die as quickly as the others." He produces a small torch and follows an irregular trail of blood splotches. "She tried to get away after he stabbed her."

They all think about that for a few awful seconds.

John has to steel himself to look at her. It's hard. She's so young, slight and pretty with a mane of wild shiny curls that fan across her back, dressed in tight jeans and pink sneakers and a floppy fleece top. Amongst a number of small deep scratches on her neck there's two irregular crimson wounds coated in bright clotted blood that has spilt to form a generous glossy pool around her face and a gruesome bib across her fleece.

"Doctor, what do you think?"

Lestrade looks over at John and back to Sherlock. "He's a doctor?"

John turns to Lestrade and offers his hand. "John Watson," he says politely.

The Detective Inspector smiles and shakes hands with surprising warmth. "Greg Lestrade. So what do you think?"

John kneels down and realises he doesn't have his cane. For a moment he is struck with a complete blank, wondering where he left it.

Sherlock doesn't look up. "You left it in the gutter at Baker Street. Now tell me what you see." 

How does he know that? John is dumbstruck for a second.

"Dr Watson?" 

John focuses.

"Well, she's bled out, one - no, two - wounds, one to her jugular, one to the carotid artery." John gingerly turns the still face to look at the wounds more closely. "Jugular and carotid," he confirms. "Very deep." He can feel her skin cooling under his fingers and her limbs are loose. "She's only been dead for a couple of hours, rigor mortis hasn't set in yet."

Lestrade nods. "Sherlock?"

Sherlock is already going over the body with a small magnifying glass and vehement concentration. He touches the fabric, studies the finger nail beds, studies the nostrils and lifts the soft lips to expose her teeth. John watches closely as he pushes up the sleeve of her fleece to expose her left arm, and of course there's a number tattooed there. Then he goes over the surface of her jeans, right down to her shoes and socks. No space goes unchecked.

John wonders exactly what he's doing.

Lestrade watches patiently with folded arms. "Anything?"

John would remember the next few minutes for the rest of his life, the first time he saw Sherlock Holmes in action, as if someone clicked on him and downloaded an entire file that by rights should have taken weeks to compile.

"She's sixteen or seventeen, not a local, travelled here with a friend. She lives in outer London but doesn't come this close in often. She's been working tonight and had some hot chips before she got here. She still lives at home, probably with one parent, probably with some younger siblings. She's using the drug herself, she's not been doing it for very long though, so she may have been introduced to the trade recently, possibly through a friend. The murderer's stolen her purse. Has

anyone found her purse?"

"There was no purse." Lestrade says.

"How do you know those things?" John says out loud without checking himself.

Sherlock goes through the findings and explains each one. "Dressed up, new fleece, girl from the suburbs who travelled to the city. London girls don't wear those shoes, that kind of fleece. Small traces of powder on her fingers means she's been handling baggies of the drug, grease on her fingertips and small traces of salt and grease on her lips and specks of potato on her back molars means she had chips. Her septum is unmarked so even though there is the faintest ring of powder around her right nostril, she hasn't used it more than a couple of times. She doesn't smoke but her jacket smells of smoke, so she's been with a smoker. Maybe the murderer? Doubtful, because there's no ash in here and no recent cigarette butts. Her teeth are very even and straight but her jaw is relatively narrow - chances are she's just had braces removed. Teenagers don't choose braces - their parents do. Her t-shirt's been ironed, her jeans are freshly washed. Teenagers don't iron t- shirts. Their mothers do though. How did she get here? The shoes are new but there's ample markings on the sole, so she's not driven or got a lift - she got a train or maybe a bus from a station quite some distance from her home: she walked."

He goes on and on, reeling of facts based on the most tiny of observations, nothing overlooked, nothing implausible, everything sustained by things that were available to any naked eye, if only they could be bothered to observe.

John has never been so impressed by anyone. "That was extraordinary," he says when Sherlock has finished.

Sherlock looks up, his face on the edge of a smile he is trying very hard to suppress. "Really?"

"It's amazing. Absolutely .... amazing."

Lestrade looks at John, down at Sherlock and back at John. He has no idea what's going on.  
Still, he thinks briefly, it's nice to see Sherlock with a friend. Wonder how long it'll last. 

"So judging by the position of the body, the killer's been disturbed."

Sherlock smack his lips. "Correct. She's been harder to stab - maybe he couldn't keep her still, or maybe he attacked her too soon, before he could get her up against the wall. Someone or something's disturbed him, changed his routine. I'm betting someone, because of the tobacco smell."

John turns to Lestrade. "So was she part of a gang? Is that why she has the punishment number tattooed on her arm?"

Sherlock and Lestrade speak at the same time. "Punishment number?"

John shrugs nervously, hesitant to share egregious information. "When I was in the middle east, I met a CIA agent who was heading investigations into the heroin trade. It was a big deal" –

Sherlock has no time. "Tell me about the number immediately." 

John draws a breath.

"He said it was a practice with some gangs in the US, if a foot soldier didn't call in to their dealer or the boss regularly, they'd take them and get the number they had to call tattooed on their arm. It was a partly humiliation thing, but sometimes a gang initiation thing."

Lestrade looks impressed, Sherlock is delighted. A conductor of light with a gun! He's about to say something when a blast of chiming music echoes from the end of the house.

"Is that a mobile phone?" John asks.


	23. Chapter 23

"I was supposed to be dead by now."

 

Greg Lestrade, who had planned his police career from the age of six, is tired of arguing with Sherlock. They have just found the dead girl's mobile. Lestrade wants to bag the phone because it's evidence, Sherlock wants to make a call from it because it may bring him face-to-face with an entirely unpredictable drug-addled psychopath who splices throats with broken bottles.

John's listening to both, his face turning back and forth. His hand is still, his leg feels fine, his mind is active and engaged with his surroundings for the first time in a year. Anything could happen.

"Sherlock, I can't let you call him." Lestrade swipes his hand over his thick hair. One of his cuffs is unbuttoned and John can see the edge of a nicotine patch.

Sherlock is livid. "You're being preposterous. I could very likely get you an arrest tonight."

"Or you could get your throat slashed and I'll have to give evidence at an inquest and I'm too busy. Give me the phone."

"Come with me. There won't be an inquest if everyone sees me get my throat slashed. In any case, Doctor Watson could verify your version of events. If I call him now, and can find out where he is, you could come with some other police men and arrest him."

"Police men and women," Lestrade corrects. "Okay. I'm not agreeing to it but I'm able to be persuaded. Explain to me exactly what has gone on, and then I'll decide if you can call him."

"Explain what?" Sherlock is about to launch in to a tirade of petulance but the Detective Inspector is immobile.

"Explain the entire case, and how you calling him now will progress the investigation."

John listens very closely to the whole story but gets lost in the details about the phones. Lestrade, who has actually read the case file and spoken to Sherlock about it several times, is no wiser.

Sherlock appears ready to implode. "Look, forget about the phones. Forget about the numbers. Focus on this: a major drug dealer is killing small time users who deal for him because they are ripping him off, or he suspects that they're ripping him off. I don't think they are, I think he has coke paranoia and is killing them in deluded rages. I don't know how many other young people have this tattoo and might be a target for these rages. I want to call him on this phone, pretend that I was the person who disturbed him while he killed her and see if I can meet him. Then you" - he points savagely at Lestrade - "can arrest him and probably get a generous increase to your division's budget."

Lestrade sighs heavily and rolls his eyes in exasperation. John is starting to think that this is his default position with Sherlock. He gives in wearily. "Oh, for Christ's sake, just call him."

Sherlock puts the phone on speaker and the three of them huddle around. The person who answers has a voice webbed with contempt and phlegm.

Sherlock is smooth and menacing.

"I was at the house in Putney tonight. ," he says plainly. "I saw you kill that girl." 

The dealer grunts like a boar. "Whaddya want."

"I want a good reason to keep my mouth shut."

"Don't waste my fucking time. Tell me what you want."

"A kilo of snow. Tonight. I'll be waiting for you in at 114 Bridge Road in Shepherd's Bush. You know it?"

"I'll be there in an hour."

"He doesn't sound very friendly," John says when the call is disconnected. 

"No, well, I don't think he is," Lestrade answers.

Sherlock looks at them both as if he might bang their heads together. 

And then he disappears.

***

John isn't sure exactly what he's supposed to do. Lestrade has walked out of the house, stopping at various points to talk with the forensic team that are now bent over the young woman's body, then with other officers who are walking around photographing the interiors, scouring through the debris looking for clues or standing in twos and threes, talking.

No one pays any attention to John.

He slips out alone and starts walking towards the tape where Sergeant Donovan is still standing.

"Did you see where Sherlock Holmes went?" he asks.

"He's gone," she's says airily. "He does that, just takes off without telling anyone. " 

John sighs. Looks like the night's over.

"Is he a friend of yours?"

John shakes his head. "I hardly know him."

"Yeah, well, keep it that way. Take my advice. Stay away from him." 

"Why?"

"You know why he comes to these kinds of crime scenes?"

Because he understands crimes like these so clearly, thinks John. Because he can see the reason and the cause of everything, because he has perfect 20-20 vision of all the plain and terrible things that the rest of the world never notices.

"Because the police ask him to?"

"No, because he gets off on it. He's a psychopath and he likes to see murdered people."

John considers arguing, but something deep inside reminds me how awful it is to be on the outside. He smiles gently, nodding a little as if he might agree, but all the time thinking how hard it must be for her amongst all these men, how hard to be taken seriously and get the career breaks, to do twice the work for half the reward. 

“Goodnight,” he says politely, and he walks down the street, wondering how long it would take him to get back to Regents Park.


	24. Chapter 24

"There it is, then."

 

Sherlock, whose mind is set out in a series of coloured rooms that echo with his footprints continuously, had been in the taxi for five minutes before he realised he had left the scene without his doctor.

My doctor, he repeats to himself with a small smile as he touches the soft dressing on his face. Physician. Surgeon. Healer. Medico. Shaman. Soldier. Possible conductor of light. John is lots of things.

Sherlock expects that none of the police would have bothered speaking to John, and that the doctor would have just wandered off, returning to wherever he was going to shoot himself. Which is a shame. Unless of course he has the sense to follow me to the factory. Which he might. Which would be good. Except he mightn't, so I should just get the cabbie to turn around and we can swing by and pick him up.

And then another door to a room in his head flies open and Sherlock rushes from the room where he thinks of John and storms in to the room where he's keeping the current case and stamps around in a frustrated fury, wondering how he might keep himself alive this time.

***

John's leg is starting to hurt again.

He's not exactly certain where he is. He's not sure what to do.

At the moment he's half-leaning towards going back to whatever horrible dark spot he can find for himself but it seems considerably less appealing now. Tonight has been great, he says to himself over and over. I learnt a lot and I had to think really carefully about everything. And then there was the stitching. God help me, I've missed it.

And there was him.

John can't quite fit Sherlock in his mind yet. He's like no person or concept he's met, an uncharted island with treacherous rocks, smoking volcanoes and thousands of undiscovered species of poisonous insects. It would be perilous to visit, but be so interesting while you were there.

And there'd be some shade and soft sand somewhere.

The sound of a siren brings him back to the cold black streets of London and he remembers that Sherlock, dangerous uncharted territory that he is, has stormed off unarmed to confront a murderer.

"Right," John says out loud.

He sees a taxi in the distant mottled lights of the High Street, does some brief calculations as to how much money he has left and raises his arm.

"114 Bridge Road Shepherd's Bush," he says without a second thought.

It's so foolhardy, so frightening that it makes him smile, hand lying calmly on his thigh, fingers tapping softly while the cutting pain in his leg melts.

***

The factory where Sherlock is currently confronting the Broken Beer Bottle Killer has recently been sold after languishing on the market for years. The hopeful owner is planning to raze the entire structure and build a series of nondescript houses that he can sell at a staggering profit but to date his plans are being wilfully ignored, languishing unopened in an inbox in the local Council.

The destitute property, which was once a thriving factory that employed 140 people, has sheltered all manners of petty crime as well as the occasional substantial crime. In a bird-brained

effort to deter people up to no good, the owner has installed a makeshift lighting system that illuminated the entire factory frontage and the rear exit. This allows some light through the building and mostly assists people up to no good to carry on illicit activity without too much strain on their eyesight.

It also is welcome by John, who probably wouldn't have gone inside if the place had been in complete blackness.

He's standing at the entrance, wondering how on earth Sherlock - or indeed anyone - would know of this place. It smells of concrete and smoke and excrement and something dead. Like the other place, the walls are covered with graffiti and there are countless spray cans scattered all over the floor, their small silvery glints available to John as far as he can see. From the foyer area where he stands, John can see there are two - no, make that three - main floor spaces divided by plaster walls that have been gouged and kicked at for years.

He follows the voices. One is loud and distinctly unfriendly, one is more refined and almost indiscernible, carrying on the still night air in a hum.

Sherlock.

John steps carefully, noiselessly through one of the main areas and comes to a wide corridor that leads to the back of the building, which apparently faces onto a car park. The lights out there enable to John to see his target.

He stops in the shadows and carefully removes his gun.

There's Sherlock, pushed up against the wall, hands flat on either side, facing a taller, thick set man who tears Sherlock's scarf from his throat and tosses it to the ground.

There's the broken bottle, held high by the other man with the sparkling lethal shards pointing at Sherlock.

There's Sherlock, furiously trying to remain a moving target, which of course is harder to stab than a terrified, still one.

There's the murderer, grabbing a thick handful of Sherlock's hair at the top of his crown and fixing him still.

There's Sherlock's pale throat, right for the stabbing. It's long, thinks John, carefully raising his gun.

There's the murderer, mouth wide open and his oddly white teeth catching the light. Cosmetic surgery, thinks John, whose heart beat hasn't raised a step as he carefully aims for the teeth and turns his hand slightly to ensure the correct trajectory.

There's the red and blue beams from the police cars. You're too late, John smiles to himself.  
There's the hand coming down to strike the throat of the only person who has treated John with understanding in the long, empty months since he's come home.

And there's the murderer, dead before he hits the ground, flopping where he stood, directly at Sherlock's feet.  
There's the police, rushing towards the sound of a gun, Lestrade at the front, terrified that Sherlock has been shot.

And there's Sherlock, his face aching, staring down at the meaty blasted head and then at his shirt, amazed that not one drop, not a single, minute drop of blood, has stained him.

And John is nowhere to be seen.


	25. Chapter 25

"Who exactly are you?"

 

The crowds and noise are increasing. Constables are threading yellow crime scene tape around the building, teams of police specialists are arriving with cases of equipment to measure, quantify and document the killing. Ballistic experts will examine the dead man's wound and talk for months about the difficult, perfect shot that killed him.

John stays in the shadows, still and silent, waiting for the right moment to walk away, hands in pockets, as if he is just passing through.

No one looks twice until he gets to a large shiny black car.

***

Sherlock is sitting on the steps of an ambulance with a mango-coloured blanket draped over his shoulders. Lestrade is standing at his feet, smirking a little.

"You're their boss. Tell them to STOP taking photos of me."

"It's not good for team morale when I do that. In any case I have to keep my powder dry for when I really need them to stop doing something stupid."

"I'm not even in shock." Sherlock tosses the blanket back in the van. "Did you catch the shooter?"

"Nope. no one saw anything. Person like the Broken Beer Bottle Murderer would have to had enemies though, maybe they followed him here...not much to go on, unfortunately."

Sherlock gives him a knowing little smile. "Oh, I wouldn't say that, Detective Inspector." 

"Alright. Gimme."

"The person who shot him has obviously had extensive training and experience - a shot like that in low light at a distance of at least 12 metres requires a still hand and incredible judgment. Only a marksman, a sniper - someone who's been trained very thoroughly in the art of skilful shooting - could do that"

"Did you see anything?"

Sherlock shakes his head. "I didn't even hear anything," he says, confused. Nothing like this has ever happened to him. "First thing I saw was the shot flare when the gun went off. Hit him right in the mouth. Perfect aim." Sherlock stops to consider what kind of a person the marksman must be. Calm surface, seething undercurrent. "You're looking for a hunter, maybe a military man, someone who's trained in very hostile conditions and probably has killed many times before. You should check gun clubs too" - but he stops short when he sees Mycroft, in the distance, bailing up John.

"What else?" Lestrade says, but Sherlock's already off.

"I don't know. Forget all that. You know, I think I have some kind of shot concussion. Just forget it." Lestrade calls after him but Sherlock's gone, yelling over his shoulder that he'll call tomorrow, making his way to John before Mycroft breaks him.

***

John's not sure what's going on. "How do you know my name?"

"That is of no importance," Mycroft says stiffly. "How do you know my brother?" 

"Who's your brother?" John's genuinely curious.

"I am," Sherlock is a little out of breath. "And what exactly are you doing here, Mycroft?"

"I came when I heard you were in danger." He seems a little offended that Sherlock would question this.

"Your brother?" John is more confused. "And is that your sister?" He points to a gorgeous

softly shaped brunette with a delectable smiling mouth who is transfixed by her mobile phone, thumbs working at a blistering speed as she leans against the car.

"That's my assistant." Mycroft says sharply. "Now what is your relationship to my brother?"

John laughs, the light hearted, cheerful little laugh of a man who is struck and delighted by something entirely ridiculous. "My relationship? There IS no relationship."

"I beg to differ. You went to an enormous amount of trouble to ensure his face was stitched earlier this evening." Mycroft turns to Sherlock. "Mummy will be devastated that you went to someone else."

"She's in Botswana."

It's not getting clearer for John. "Mummy? Who's mummy?" 

"Our mother." Sherlock is snarling directly at Mycroft.

"You really are brothers?" John's surprised. They sound like brothers but the resemblance is hard to pick.

"We are. Now will kindly explain how you've come to know my brother?"

He wants to answer I don't, I was just on my way to commit suicide and he got hit by a scooter in front of me, but instead John shrugs his shoulders. The world's changed a lot in the last couple of hours and he's still surging with adrenaline.

"No. I'm won't. Now if you don't mind, I'm hungry and would like to get some food." Which is not strictly true, but it allows for a dignified exit.

Sherlock is immensely proud.

"Me too," lies Sherlock, who almost never feels like eating after he's solved an important crime. "I know an excellent Italian place near here." He turns to Mycroft. "John and I are having dinner. I bid you good night, Mycroft." But he doesn't leave, instead leans in to his big brother and talks in a hush, indicating the pretty texting woman with a dip of his head. "What are they talking about?"

"They're playing scrabble!" The brothers smile affectionately in the texting woman's direction for a second and then its back to business.

"Sherlock, tell me who he is."

"He's my friend, Mycroft. Now piss off. It's dinner time."

"Your friend? Oh, dear God. You don't have friends, Sherlock."

Sherlock looks over to John, who is waiting a few feet away, smiling benignly. "I have one, Mycroft. Now why don't you go install a puppet government in some despotic, under-resourced country and leave me alone."

John sees them whispering and Sherlock storm off in huff. He waits until he catches up. 

"So," Sherlock starts. "Are you okay?"

"Yes, yes, I'm fine."

"Good shot. I didn't realise you'd been a sniper. Thank you"

John is silent. Sherlock can sense he's a little embarrassed so he tries a different approach. "I told you'd be an asset at a crime scene."

"I can't believe you came storming over here by yourself." 

"I knew you'd come."

"No you didn't."

"I mean it - thank you."

"Well, it took me a long time to put those stitches in and they're beautifully even. I didn't want them ruined by some sadistic coke fiend."

Sherlock laughs. "Actually, he was a steroids fiend."

"Ah. Then that explains the aggression and paranoia."

"Indeed. And on that topic - I'm pretty sure you've thought of this, but have you got the powder burns off your hands? Not that I think you'd be in danger of conviction, but it would preferable if there was no trial."

"It's all fine. Where are we going?"

"To a fabulous pizza place I know not far from here. You know, you can always tell a great Italian restaurant by the way they serve their parmesan cheese and black pepper."

"Really?"

They walk side by side through sharp cold air. Sherlock's explaining the best way to serve parmesan cheese and the importance of pepper grinders, John's asking interested questions, both are enjoying each other's company immensely, unaware that they are starting the pattern that will be theirs alone for many, many years.

They're both incredibly happy.

***

Sherlock has taken John to not the most salubrious, but certainly one of the best Italian eateries in London. The owner could not be happier to see him and comes out from the kitchen with his arms flung open.

"Sherlock! Great to see you!" He grabs Sherlock by the shoulder and kisses him extravagantly on both cheeks.

"Renzo," says Sherlock affectionately. "Good to see you too."

"Order whatever you want, it's on the house for you and your date." He turns and smiles at John who almost corrects him but changes his mind. What the hell.

Renzo can't wait to tell John his connection with Sherlock.

"He saved my brother, you know. He was facing a murder charge and Sherlock proved he didn't do it, saved him from a huge prison sentence."

"I was able to prove that Renzo's brother Angelo wasn't responsible for a car jacking because he was in fact robbing a house a few miles away. With Renzo."

"I got a suspended sentence," Renzo says proudly. "Here, do you want a table at the back? I've got a fantastic fettuccini a longo on the menu tonight - I make the sauce myself from chilli and lime."

"It sounds splendid, Renzo, but I'm particularly keen for Doctor Watson to try your exceptional pizzas."

"You want a take out?"

Sherlock turns to John and takes a leap. "We could take them back to my place if you prefer, or we could eat them here - what do you think?"

John is a couple of steps ahead of him. "Probably be easier to just go back to your place. Actually," and he looks over to Renzo, "Is there any where near here where I can get a couple of beers?"

Renzo is all arms and dramatic gestures, adamant that he'll provide the beer too. You can't have pizza without beer, he insists.

***

In the taxi home, Sherlock stares out the window, enjoying the electric buzz of John's thoughts.  
It's deep and consistent and comforting.

"So," John says after a while, "You do this kind of thing all the time? Solve crimes like this?" 

"I do."

"And you gather all your clues just by looking at things?"

"I start that way, and then I look for the where the evidence might be that supports those clues." 

"And the police ask you to help them?"

"The police consult me about certain crimes, yes. But they're not my only client. Sometimes private citizens will come to me with cases and if they're interesting, I'll take them."

The electricity fills the cab for a while before John speaks again. "So how come no one knows about you? I mean, why aren't you in all the papers and being followed by a TV crew?"

"I keep a low profile. I never talk to journalists. Easier to work if no one knows who I am and how I work."

"Do you have a website?"

"I do." His pride is evident in his smile and the straightened shoulders. "The Science of Deduction. You should look it up."

"I will."

John looks back out the window, seeing London with slightly different eyes, watching the old buildings and the ubiquitous shine of recent rain shimmer under the lights. It looks new and familiar, like it would look to someone who has come home after a long exile.

On the other side of the cab, Sherlock notices the electricity in the air has increased again.


	26. Chapter 26

"Oh! You actually live here?"

 

Sherlock and John are back at the place where they first met. Some kindly soul has retrieved John's cane from the gutter and propped it against the wall, right next to Sherlock's front door.

John carries it as he follows Sherlock up the stairs. 

"This is a fantastic location."

"It is indeed. My landlady is an old friend and gave me a great rate. I helped her out a few years ago when her husband was on death row in Florida."

"You saved him?"

"No, I made certain he fried." Sherlock is twisting the key to the door of his flat and opens it wide, ushering John in ahead of him.

John's not certain what he was expecting from Sherlock's flat but once inside it was impossible to imagine him living anywhere else. It's been so long since John has been anywhere welcoming and comfortable. He looks around at the coloured wallpaper, the fireplace, the skull on the mantelpiece and the comfortable chairs and feels real covertness in his heart. It's a lovely place to live, charming and rustic but eminently practical, dependable and eccentric like a proper English gentleman's home should be.

Sherlock moves a few items quickly and places the pizzas and beer on the coffee table. He turns to John, who is standing with his hands behind his back, waiting to see if he was right about this.

Sherlock takes a couple of shy steps towards him, perhaps summoning his nerve. "Make yourself at home," he suggests and John watches him carefully, nods just once so very slightly. Sherlock pushes him up against the wall and kisses him hard and gracelessly.

John grips the uninjured side of Sherlock's face with his right hand and moves it a few inches away from his mouth. Sherlock freezes at the interruption; cold terror floods his belly, the horrible thought that he's misjudged once again and done entirely the wrong thing to his guest.

But John is smiling." You'll break your stitches," he says calmly. "Slow down." He leans back in and offers his mouth gently, dabbing his tongue against Sherlock's, slowly winding his arms around him until his hands meet on his back.

It is very tender. John breaks the spell. 

"Can we sit down maybe?"

Sherlock has gone into a bit of a haze and takes a few seconds to realise exactly what John is asking. "Certainly. Of course. I have a couch."  
He walks John backwards to the couch a couple of feet away, a hand on his shoulder and the other on his waist as if he might get away if he's not monitored.

John falls over back first and smiles at Sherlock who lands right on top of him.

He looks straight into the pretty cobra eyes. "I'm wearing too many clothes for this. Do you mind if I take my jacket off?"

"No, no, please, go right ahead. Actually, your jumper too, while you're at it. And your shirt.  
You don't need that either. Nor your trousers. In fact I might join you."

John has just folded his jacket to a neat parcel on the floor. "Actually, you might want to leave your shirt on."

"Might I? Why?"

Because I like unbuttoning shirts. Because I can watch you when you're getting me off and you'll remind me that we're doing something wanton and impulsive , half dressed and half naked.

"Looks good," is all John says.

Sherlock collected small fetishes for a while and silently adds shirts to the long neglected list.

He kisses him again, and Sherlock, a little more focused now, concentrates on all the clues and surprises in the Doctor's mouth. Sherlock has theories about mouths and their flavours, having tasted so many people who have for one reason or another turned out to be very bad ideas indeed. There have been men with sour mouths whose genitals tasted of cheese, women with bitter mouths who tasted of slightly over ripe fruit, men and women who tasted metallic and set his teeth on edge. No one tasted right but John does. He tastes warm and his flavour fills Sherlock, the same way chlorophyll saturates your palette when you snap a sapling.

And for John, Sherlock feels right. He's all bones and long clasping fingers and jutting edges, a heavy head of hair that smells like sweet powder and oil, skin light like buttermilk as John unbuttons his shirt and feels the secret warmth in there, the shell like ridge of his ribs, the soft expanse of his abdomen and the thin trail of hair, everything lean and tense and underfed. John rolls his fingers under the hard cage of Sherlock's left rib.

Sherlock recognises the that John is palpating his spleen and turns a little, making it easier. Do people do that, he is about to ask, should I be doing that to you but is diverted when he catches sight of the dog tags dangling over John's fine chest and then the mangled whorl of scar tissue on John's left shoulder.

John closes his eyes. No one has seen it; most days John himself can barely bring himself to look at it.

He's immensely fortunate that the first person who does see it regards it with great curiosity and endless affection.

Sherlock blots the uneven surface of the scar with heavy lips, savouring the scent and the awkward texture and sends his finger tips over the strap muscles, around to the exit wound at the back. The muscles are hard; Sherlock imagines how fibrous they'd feel under dissection.

They find each other quite marvelous.

John talks softly against the neat conch of Sherlock's ear. Sit up for me, lean back, he suggests and Sherlock moves back, his shirt unbuttoned now, opened wide so John can see the small dark tufts of his armpits and the tight belly button. He flexes against John's careful touch, trying so hard to control himself but knows that he is unravelling by the second.

John reaches for one hand, a kiss for each finger while Sherlock clumsily flexes the other, gulping his breath a little, a little nervous, watching as John sinks to his knees on the floor in front of him. He looks up with saint's eyes and so Sherlock knows what is about to happen.

Breathe, Sherlock tells himself, breathe and be calm but he's forgotten that hot salty pleasure and he gasps in surprise as his cock slips in to the silky wetness of John's mouth. He crushes his eyes closed because if he watches he'll lose it completely. It's been so long since he’s had this and he wants it to last all night but John's too clever, too experienced and Sherlock comes with hard

clenched teeth, one hand loose on John's shoulder and the other clasped in John's. Sherlock feels the light flick on in every chamber of his heart and for once it doesn't feel uninhabited.

John waits for Sherlock to look and when he does, swallows hard and rolls his tongue over his bottom lip.

Then John, apparently a simple man but in truth full of surprises and common sense, takes one of the beers and cracks it open sharply before taking a good swig.

Sherlock is crestfallen. Wasn't I good?

He hands the can to Sherlock. "Need a drink?"

He shakes his head. "Do you always have a beer after fellatio?" 

"Only if I want to taste nice for my partner," John tells him.

This courtesy zaps through Sherlock's head and brings him a tiny bright bulb of realisation .  
He's making it more pleasant for me to kiss him. He asked Renzo for the beer especially. He planned this back at the restaurant. He planned for this. I'm not a impulse purchase. He planned to go down on me. He planned to be with me and to taste nice for me.

Sherlock wants to kiss the man who planned to make him feel so good.

He slips down on the floor and Sherlock starts at his throat, gently nurses his nipples, nips sharply at his tight navel and looks up only when John steadies him with both hands.

"What? Isn't it good?"

"Oh, it's good. It's very good. But much as I like it, you really shouldn't be considering reciprocating while you have those very neat stitches. Especially while they're still fresh."

"I have an excellent pain threshold."

"I don't. I really won't enjoy it if I even think you might be in discomfort. Come here."

Sherlock slides up the warm strong body, watching as John takes both hands and examines each palm.

"Are you going to tell me my fortune?"

John laughs softly. "Yes, actually I am." He takes Sherlock's left hand, studies the palm with its blood crusted bark right across the centre and rubs it tenderly with the print of his thumb. "You won't be using this hand to get me off because it's grazed from your fall tonight. I should have put gauze on that. Sorry. This hand though," and he kisses the centre of Sherlock's right palm. "looks more than capable."

Sherlock looks at both his hands and wrinkles his nose slightly. 

"Wait here for a moment."

John watches his bare backside, not quite covered by his shirt, with a mix of quiet admiration and rough lust.

Sherlock returns with a haphazard armful of bedding and a sealed bottle of lubricant, both of which he drops on the floor.

"Lay down. Get comfortable."

John does what he's told. The sheets smell nice.

Sherlock lays down beside him. "Do you want me to turn off the light?"

The change in John's body is instant; his muscles tense, he sits up on his elbow, his face turned away in shame.

"I'd really prefer it if you didn't...I'm not ..."

Sherlock gets it immediately and stretches his arm across John's chest. "Sorry, sorry, my mistake. You told me you were invalided, I didn't factor for post traumatic distress. I apologise."

"S'all right. Sorry."

"Please, don't be. We're all friends here."

Friends. Oh, for a friend. It's a lovely thing to hear and John sinks back down on the pillows Sherlock has wedged behind him.

The tension in his body is fascinating. Sherlock strokes it, feels it clamping all John's muscles, weaving tight lines across the powerful muscles on his shoulder, forming a hard wall on his stomach, flickering through his hand as a tremor.

"Lie down," Sherlock says and his voice is beautiful, liquid and warm like butter and sugar when they meet over heat and turn to caramel. John settles in the soft fabrics, his lips parted slightly, closing his eyes at the thought of Sherlock's good hand setting him to rights.

"I'm sorry your excellent stitches prevent my from returning the pleasure you gave me, but I hope this is just as good." John watches with cautious eyes as Sherlock pours the lubricant over his fingers and glazes his cock with it. It hits home hard, John sucks in his breath and his pelvis bucks instinctively.

"Relax."

The hand is strong, thorough and unbelievably slow. John's never been pulled so slowly. He waits for the strokes to quicken, shifts under the slightly frustrating touch to try and speed it up but Sherlock pays no attention. John grows impatient after a couple of minutes but Sherlock doesn't change his tempo, just leans down and whispers relax, just relax, it'll take a bit of time but I promise it'll be good.

John breathes deeply and relaxes. The slow strokes continue while Sherlock nuzzles his face, gently bites his earlobe, rubs his lips over the gold bristles on John's cheek.

It takes a long time.

His climax starts as a speck out on the horizon that comes towards him at a glacial pace, swelling gradually and then bearing down on him like the heaviest clouds. He draws his knees up but still the hand is still slow, so slow as the tiny vessels contract and squeeze inside him and he looks to Sherlock who is watching with adoring eyes and fuck, oh fuck, he tips his face back as he's caught in the extraordinary storm that Sherlock has conjured. It's relentless and lights up along every nerve ending, he feels like he will come for hours. When the lights start to die he looks up at Sherlock smiling; his heart splits and he falls so deeply in love he is certain he will never find his way out.

***

"I actually like my pizza lukewarm," John tells him as they sit in the tangle of bed clothes a little while later.

"Renzo does make great pizza. It would be good at any temperature."

They've been chatting quite politely now, friendly, not uncomfortable but perhaps a touch reserved.

Sherlock, though, has just about used up his reserve of refinement. 

"Do you want to stay the night?"  
"I don't know. I mean yes. Yes, I do."

Sherlock can see there are some things he has to unpack here. He goes back to the John Room in his mind palace while he bites carefully at a slice of pizza, looking for the anchovy because a burst of salt is a great accompaniment to thinking:

Left home yesterday without his wallet and phone, looking to end it all. So he's left things behind at the Warlock's house. Military man wouldn't leave a mess. He's packed already. Not that he has much anyway. Eight years away, last year in spiralling depression - hardly going to be accumulating anything. Besides a cat. Can he bring his cat here? Cats are interesting. Could experiment on a cat. To an extent. Could John come here and be in my home? He has a gun and is

luminous and not an idiot because he knows who to shoot and he gives wonderful head but we'd probably have to negotiate some things. Also, he has dog tags and who would have considered how attractive that could be? He shouldn't be killing himself because he is kind and invaluable and could actually be very happy here. I would be very happy to have him here and the cat wouldn't be hurt.

"I play the violin," Sherlock says without looking up from his pizza. "It helps me think. 

John's not sure what he's supposed to say. Sherlock continues.

"Potential flatmates should know the worst about one another." 

"Sorry?"

It takes Sherlock a moment to remember that John isn't actually in the John Room with him. "You've saved my life. I'd like to save yours."

It's the kindest thing anyone has said to John in years and he smiles broadly, dipping his face in appreciation.

"I'm not sure ...sorry? You want a flat mate?"

"There's a second room upstairs. I play the violin. Sometimes I don't talk for hours. Days if it's really bad. I like to do experiments."

John holds his gaze for several long seconds. He wants to ask about the violin because it's such a wonderful thing to learn about a person this strange, but it's not what comes out.

"I've got post traumatic stress syndrome. I have really bad nightmares. I cry out, I have - I can't sleep in the dark."

Sherlock doesn't blink. "I've got a human head in the fridge and I can fit most of toes in the tap in the bathtub."

John's face is perfectly still for a second or two. 

"Are we having a weird-off competition?"

Such a prospect is enchanting to Sherlock here on his living room floor, entirely naked with another naked man, eating lukewarm pizza. "Human head in the fridge. I win."

"Yes. Categorically. I can't compete with that. I actually don't want to compete with that. Why do you have a human head in the fridge? Is it someone you know?"

"I'm friends with a forensic pathologist at St Barts. They let me use their facilities sometimes and when I need a body part, they help out."

"Why does anyone need a head?"

"I was trying to work out how much my head would weigh with my hair saturated. Then I got to thinking about the weight of a human head after drowning. I thought I might also try and measure the coagulation speeds of saliva but then realised I was an idiot because" –

"Saliva is an enzyme. It doesn't coagulate, it evaporates." 

"Exactly."

"What does the head weigh with wet hair?" John hears himself asking.

"It depends on the temperature of the water! I'm not sure why that is, but hot water seems to weigh less. I haven't worked out why."

John chews his pizza thoughtfully. After a while he says, "I trained at St Barts." 

Sherlock dutifully files that in the mind palace.

After John has eaten a lot and Sherlock has eaten a little, they toss the box of crusts to one side and curl up the floor on Sherlock's cotton sheets. John is exhausted after a day of walking, a day of grieving and a night of murder, Sherlock - not so much. He waits until John rolls over and looks at all the marks on his back. There are lots of little recessions, tiny little dips which perfectly accommodate a fingertip. Rugby player, Sherlock realises, and puts that in the John Room as well.

After forty minutes or so John tosses a little, rolls to his back and flings his arm above his

head. Sherlock watches carefully as John is hunted in his sleep and when it gets too gruesome to watch, says out loud, "I think there's going to be rain in Sussex tomorrow."

And John stills.

Sherlock makes a note of that too.

Carbohydrates and the excitement of nearly being stabbed to death eventually take their toll. Sherlock grows drowsy and thinks it's possible he might sleep a couple of hours. He closes his eyes to check.

When he drifts off he's back in John's Room, which is cream with a navy trim and has a few files stacked on the floor but when he wakes in the morning it is overgrown with beautiful green plants and the ceiling is open to a clear sky, and all the things he knows about John are written on pieces of stiff paper and pinned to branches at various heights.


	27. Chapter 27

"Oh, and my brother will abduct you shortly."

 

John, whose longest relationship clocks in at just under eight months, has slept on a total of seven floors in four different countries. Five, if you include Wales.

***

Sherlock has been awake for several hours and is covering his severed head with a couple of tea towels when he hears John stirring - little creaks on the floor boards, the low rustle of sheets, then the stillness of a man who realises he has nothing to wear except yesterday's clothes.

"How's your face?" is the first thing John says as he sits up. His muscles are tight and a little compressed; he feels them ease gradually as blood chugs back into them.

Sherlock smiles to himself. "A little sore, but nothing unexpected. "

"Why did we sleep on the floor?"

"No idea," Sherlock answers from the kitchen. "Breakfast is going to be a problem." 

"Why?"

"I haven't really got breakfast things. I can make you a cup of tea, if you'd like." 

"I haven't had a good cup of tea for ages."

"There's no guarantee you're going to get one now, either. But it will be tea. How do you take

it?"

 

"Milk no sugar, thank you."

John waits for the awkwardness that visits all new couples the morning after but there is none.

He doesn't feel awkward, extraneous, unwelcome or anxious.

***

"I thought we could go and get your things, " Sherlock says as they sit on the floor together, sipping.

"So you're happy for me to move in here?"

"Why would I say so if I wasn't? Would you like to live here?" 

"I would, very much."  
"I suppose I should encourage you to talk it over with your therapist. Although you've not seen them in the last few months."

"How did you..." For John is still at the stage where Sherlock's gifts appear to be a magic trick.

"Obvious. Of course you're going to have a therapist. You've been wounded in a war and you've been invalided. You have psychosomatic ailments, debilitating nightmares, you're scared of the dark. You've experienced some awful things and then thrust back into civilian life. I doubt seriously you would have chosen to work in a pharmaceutical company or live with idiots. You're  
doing so because you've obviously followed some prosaic and not very useful advice."

John looks at the hot tea in his mug. "She meant well. She thought she was treating me properly."

"And she probably thinks she cured you too, but when I met you last night you were about an hour away from killing yourself."

It seems very distant now, and without purpose. John has no response.

"No need to justify it. It makes perfect sense. What else could you have done? You've followed pretty standard advice and it's made you more ill than you were because the therapist prescribed the wrong treatment for you."

"The right treatment isn't - I mean, all I could think of was being back in the war. It's not as

though the right treatment was obvious."

"It might have been to someone who diagnosed you properly. In fact I might as well do it now." John is a little taken aback but Sherlock proceeds regardless.

"You're an intelligent man who has followed orders while living on your wits in unnaturally hostile conditions for eight years. Clearly you thrived, or you never would have lasted eight years. The only thing that stopped you doing that was a bad injury, not a mental breakdown. You had the break down after the injury, obviously. "

"How do you know this?"

Sherlock carries on with his diagnosis.

"Now both things - the orders and your surroundings - are failing you horribly and there is no feasible solution, certainly not one your therapist was able to give you. So you stopped going back and, not surprisingly grew more depressed. Yet last night you were sufficiently diverted to lose a psychosomatic limp then act with enormous courage and great skill in a stressful situation. You got me into a public hospital and treated me without raising anyone's suspicion. You did that because you knew you could, and because you enjoyed doing it, despite what you might say to anyone else. You then attended a gruesome crime scene that obviously affected you emotionally but didn't affect your ability to plan and execute - so to speak - a very thorough back up plan for me. I'd wager your pulse didn't increases a beat when you shot that man. Afterwards you walked away unnoticed and if it weren't for my impossible meddling brother I might not have seen you again."

Now John is just staring.

"So here's my treatment plan: I go to crime scenes. I like to take risks. I would like some company. I'd be more than willing to share all those likes with you and I'm certain you're willing too. I'm not sentimental and I'm not likely to ever remember your birthday or bring you flowers but I'd like - there's no reason why we can't continue to ... connect like we did last night. if you're amenable to that." Sherlock stops for a minute and finds himself admiring John's face. It looks so much softer in daylight. "I'd like you to join my war. This is a call to arms, Captain Watson."

John is still for a moment. His admiration is hard to express. "Let's get my boxes." 

"You can bring your cat too."

"I don't have a cat." And then he remembers Rhonda and grimaces a bit. 

"What did you do to the cat? Did you kill it?"

John is horrified. "No! No, I'd never kill an animal. No, they didn't want her. The people I live with. She was as depressed as I was. I didn't want to be unhappy after I was, you know, gone, so..." -his face takes on a sheepish scowl- "I gave her to an old persons' home as a therapy pet."

Sherlock thinks about this. A therapy pet. "Aren't all pets a form of therapy? Wouldn't it just be a pet?"

John has to think about it too. It takes a couple of seconds before he smiles. 

"I suppose it is. How did you know about the cat?"

"Easy. You had a few light cat hairs on your trousers. I saw them while we were in the cab, going to the hospital."

"How did you know it want' dog hair?"

"Dog hair is markedly different in composition and appearance to cat hair."

At this early stage John is yet to grasp the enormity of Sherlock Holmes. "It's a bit overwhelming. You see a lot."

Sherlock shakes his head. "Everybody see things. That just don't pay attention. I observe everything. There's a difference. Do you want to go to the hospital and steal the cat back?"

"You look like you rather like that idea."

"Well, I haven't stolen anything from a hospital in ages, unless you count a couple of canulas last night and I don't. A cat would be an interesting thing to steal."

Canulas? What would he want with canulas? John lets it through to the keeper. "What about the patients?"

"Elderly patients in a care facility? I doubt they'd notice or, even if they did, do you think they'd remember?"

John burst out laughing and after a second or two, Sherlock laughs with him.

"I really think she'd be happier there. I can always go and visit her if I have to."

***

Mrs Hudson heard the second voice last night, heard the two sets of footsteps on the stairs, the two voices talking all morning. She wonders who Sherlock has up there.

Only one way to find out.

A short time later she calls out to Sherlock with a melodic voice. "Hoo hoo! Are you around Sherlock? I've made you some scones!"

"Good morning Mrs Hudson. Most fortuitous that you should drop in now. This is Doctor Watson. He's going to move in to help me with the rent."

"That's lovely. How do you do, Doctor Watson." 

John takes her extended hand gently.

"John, please. Lovely to meet you. This is a great place."

"You'll be very happy here but Sherlock will drive you mad. When he does, you just pop down and see me. The kettle's always on! "

After she's gone they get to work on the scones. They're very good.

John talks with a full mouth. "Your land lady is lovely. Does she make you scones often?"

Sherlock answers with a full mouth too. "No, this is the first time. It's also the first time I've had a guest stay overnight. Obviously she made these just to get a look at you."

John watches as Sherlock licks crumbs from his lips. "Obviously."

***

"I know you went for days without changing and showering in the harsh terrain of Afghanistan, but you might like some clean underwear."

Sherlock has left clean underwear folded for John in the bathroom. It's a nice touch.

"You use fancy soap," John says when he appears fresh and clean some twenty minutes later. 

"I'm not a cheap date. Now I need you to take a walk and get my brother over and done with."

"Sorry?"

Sherlock explains Mycroft as best he can. John listens carefully. 

"He's going to abduct me?"

"Yes. Don't worry. He won't use violence. He just wants to pay you to spy on me." 

"I don't want to spy on you."

"Good. I don't want you too either. Not that you could. We'll just make up things to tell him." 

"Okay, provided you're comfortable with it," John says. "What is the going rate for spying on  
one's sibling?"

Sherlock has thought about this carefully. "I wouldn't take less than two hundred pounds a week."

So John takes an idle stroll down Baker Street and, sure enough, is trailed by a black car. "Hello, Doctor Watson," says the lovely brunette in the back seat who's still thumbing her phone. "Please get in the car."

Sherlock waits patiently on the couch, stretched to his full length, hands pressed lightly

together in a kind of prayer under his chin. He is going over the previous evening with some satisfaction and discussing with John the practicalities of keeping separate rooms. It makes no difference to him that John isn't there.

Presently a wad of notes is dropped on his stomach.

"I got him up to two hundred and eighty pounds! That's your share. He's also said we can have the car to pick up my stuff. Who are you talking to?"

"I said, we should keep separate rooms." 

"You're talking to me?"

"Yes."

"I wasn't here."

"Ah." It's always a pleasant surprise for Sherlock when the person he has been conversing with turns out not to have been there after all. "No matter. We've agreed that we can keep separate rooms. That will allow us some storage and privacy if we need it, but we can always visit one another if we chose."

John nods, despite not having been present at what seem to be interesting negotiations. "I hope to see you in there often."

"Ditto, doctor."

Later that day the black shiny car returns but minus the mysterious texting brunette. Sherlock and John sit quite separate in the back seat, staring out the window.

"So you would have been a fly half."

John turns around to face him. "Sorry?" 

"When you played Rugby."

"How could you - what things can you see that tell you that I played Rugby?"

"You have sprig marks on your back. " And when John is none the wiser, "There are very small indentations on your back from where you have been trampled underneath people wearing sprig toed boots. The most likely positions for being caught in the bottom of a scrum are the front row, or the fly half after feeding a scrum. You're not a front rower. A winger doesn't get trampled as much. Am I right?"

"Yes. I played Rugby at University and in the Army. And I was a fly half. You're amazing."

Sherlock savours this for a few seconds. Amazing. He likes amazing John. He likes John telling him he's amazing. No one else does. He wants to amaze him for the rest of his life.

"Did you play?" John wonders.

"I did at school, for a time. We all had to." 

"Why?"

"I went to a boarding school. They had to have an never ending schedule of organised activities to keep everyone out of mischief."

"I can't imagine that had any impact on you."

"None whatsoever. I didn't mind Rugby though. I was a bit sad when they kicked me off the team."

"What did you do?"

"I turned up at a match with two balls. So each team had a ball, so there was no basis for competition. You should have seen the look on everyone faces." Sherlock chuckles. "I just thought someone would have the sense to toss one of the balls out. Instead both teams just stood there, each with a ball, as if the game was over."

"They kicked you off the team for that?"

"Well, a lot of parents turned up to watch. They were there to see their sons displaying

prodigious sportsmanship, not standing around like the mindless sheep they were." 

"Were your parents there?"

"No. My parents never came near the place." 

"So you grew up in the country?"

"No, London."

"So you'd come home at holidays?" 

Sherlock shook his head. "No often, no."

There's no further explanation. John is reluctant to take it any further. In any case, they're not far from former home.

It seems like ages since he was last there.

Charlotte and the Warlock are in the kitchen. They've only been back for a few hours but already the house harbours that unmistakable stench of careless sex.

Sherlock looks positively nauseated.

John stacks his small collections of belongings in the hallway and stands beside Sherlock, about to explain that he's leaving. Sherlock, though, has got it under control. He flashes a police warrant card.

"I'm Detective Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard There have been some disturbing international developments since you've been away. Doctor Watson is now required by Interpol to undertake a number of top secret investigations in Belgium. He has to leave immediately."

Charlotte and her Warlock shift their eyes from John, to Sherlock and back to John again. John smiles a little.

The Warlock isn't pleased. "Man, this means that we have to get someone else to help with the rent."

"That's not my problem. The future of the nation is at stake." 

Sherlock is looking at Charlotte. Solicitor, early thirties, series of hopeless boyfriends. Halfway to becoming an ardent dominatrix. Keen on books and programs about personal style. Not particularly keen on her job nor very good at it. Warlock likes his job. He will end up supporting her soon. he broke his arm when he was eight or nine, She looks a little green and her dress is uncomfortably tight. Fluid though, not fat. Has gone off her contraceptives without telling the Warlock.

"What happened to Rhonda?" Charlotte asks. 

"The cat," John says quietly.  
"Rhonda has been recalled by the Home Office and sent to the Small Mammal Autoclave Unit.  
She'll then be debriefed and redeployed to another top secret military facility." 

"Wait, she's a spy?"

"She can interpret morse code used in intelligence gathering, so yes. Doctor Watson trained her."

John concentrates on keeping his face immobile.

Colin the Warlock nods his head. "I wondered what he was doing in his room all the time. I told you he was some kind of agent. So what's he going to do in Belgium?"

Sherlock looks away, unconcerned. " I can't divulge any more than that. Also, sir - I require that you stop identifying as a warlock and start admitting you're an accountant. And you" - he turns to Charlotte - "Congratulations on your pregnancy. Are you ready, Dr Watson?"

"Oh God, yes." John lays a two weeks' rent on the counter. "Thanks for the shelter."

***

On the way home John stares from the window and starts to shake gently. Sherlock can see he's laughing.

"What?"

"The Small Mammal Autoclave Unit." John's face is bright, his eyes glitter. "Teaching a cat Morse code!"

And they both laugh together, really laugh, their mouths opens, their faces crinkled, laugh until their sides ache and tiny millet seeds of tears run from the corner of their eyes.

When they get home and take the boxes to John's room, they find that Mrs Hudson has made his bed.

***

Before the night sets in, John walks to the local Boots to buy some gauze and antiseptic cream. Then it occurs to him that if he's going to go out on cases with a man who has no concern for his own safety, he should have a proper kit.

So he buys tapes and iodine and ibifuren and gloves too. The thought of having a kit again is ridiculously exciting.

When he gets home Sherlock is back in pyjamas and back on the couch. 

"I'd like to dress your wound, if you're okay with that."

Ordinarily Sherlock hates this type of fuss and will actively obstruct anyone who seeks to assist him with any kind of health care. Tonight his face aches a little, and in any case he doesn't mind being in the centre of John's orbit for a while.

He rolls to his side and holds his hair back. John kneels in front of him.

The old gauze lifts easily to reveal the stitches, their little black tails of thread bent in different directions. John carefully presses the wound with his fingertip; it comes away dry and the skin appear to be fusing nicely.

Sherlock closes his eyes as the fresh bandage is set in place. His heart beats a little harder when John gently cups his chin for a split second and says finished, all done.

***

Privately they both wait to learn that their rash co-habitation has been an awful mistake but to their surprise that never eventuates. They are dissimilar in many way and near identical in others. They agree on a lot of important things and come close to blow on other topics. They enjoy unpacking their sex life and learn a lot from the other under (and on top) the sheets and assorted furniture.

They never talk about their relationship per se. There isn't much to say, says Sherlock. It's all fine, says John.

Although obviously their relationship does not go unnoticed by friends and family.

Mrs Hudson, who has lived a much more wild, and much more unpredictable life than even Sherlock can guess, is neither surprised or curious. She is happy there is another lodger in the house, and happy that Sherlock has company. That they make a bit of noise sometimes, or come and go noisily at all hours of the day and night, holds little interest for her.

She discusses the little household with Mrs Turner.

"Are your getting married then?" Mrs Turner asks nicely.

It's a bone of contention between them. Mrs Turner has married ones and has set the bar rather high.

"No, but Sherlock's not the marrying kind. You know what he's like. Russia one week, Rutherford the next. He hasn't got time to get to get married."

"Still, you never know," says Mrs Turner generously. "This new one might be the right one." 

"I think they're happy the way they are."

"Well, let's just wait and see." Mrs Turner loves weddings.

Lestrade has long given up trying to second guess anything Sherlock does. He assumes John is his partner because it seems unlikely any person would stay with Sherlock casually on a voluntary basis. And sometimes, he sees the way Sherlock will look up at John when he made an especially brilliant deduction. He'll see John smile, genuinely impressed, and he'll see Sherlock swell a little, as if he was actually able to ruffle a spray of feathers.

And because Lestrade is kind, and because he holds Sherlock in high esteem, it makes him happy for them. Good relationships are rare. He figures if Sherlock can mate, then there is hope for every difficult person world wide.

Lestrade's team are not quite so generous. None of them like Sherlock, and all resent that he might happy. They waste time trying to find out the real nature of his relationship with the gentle doctor.

Sally Donovan is hanging around Lestrade's office door while he is still trying to work out how the Broken Beer Bottle Killer used all those mobile phones. It's doing his head in.

"So is that blonde doctor bloke The Freak's boyfriend?" Donovan's arms are folded across her chest, her feet crossed at the ankles. She's leaning on the door jam.

"I have no idea. Have you got the first volume of the Broken Beer Bottle file?" 

"No. So what, is he his friend? Is someone paying him to stay there?"

"Donovan, I have no idea, and frankly I don't care. I don't know why it's of any importance to any of you. Now go find volume one of the brief and bring it back here now."

Sally stomps off to menace one of the clerks.

Anderson calls, seemingly about some insignificant administrative issue. Lestrade waits wearily for the inevitable question.

"So is Holmes just allowed to bring anyone to crime scenes now?"

"He isn't bringing anyone to the scene. He's accompanied by a doctor - a very good doctor from what I've seen - who actually helps him with the cases."

"So what's he doing with anyone at all? Has anyone told Watkins or whatever his name is what Holmes is actually like?"

"I don't know. I doubt he'd care. They're living together so I'd imagine WatSON knows exactly what his like."

"They're living together?" And Anderson laughs. 

"Have you called me for any real reason?"

"No, I just want to check on a couple of things."

"Well you've checked. Now get back to work." Lestrade ends the call and throws his phone on the desk noisily. Why can't everyone just be nice? He sighs heavily and go backs to the start of the brief to try and work out all those mobiles again.

***

Mycroft had a little more insight to the relationship but not even he was able to discern the exact nature of it.

It took him but days to compile a substantial file on John, a file so complete that it provided a copy of his therapist's notes through to details from the somewhat inept surgeon who repaired John's shoulder, right through the address and phone number of the vendor from whom John's mother bought his uniform when he started high school.

It was mildly interesting reading but Mycroft was still none the wiser about the actual relationship between the two.

Ultimately he deduced that Doctor Watson was a carer, and that Sherlock was certainly a man who needed some heavy duty care in some aspects of his life. People have needs. They seek to

fulfill them through other people. In that respect Sherlock and John could not have chosen more wisely.

Sherlock pointedly would not reveal anything to Mycroft about his relationship with Dr Watson. John would only ever say that he really wasn't sure. Still, Mycroft wished them well and hoped for Sherlock's sake that the Doctor was as loyal and sensible as he appeared. He had no illusions that John entered into their financial agreements wholly sponsored by Sherlock; he kept the payments up for three months to help them establish a little nest egg and enjoy a few treats.

Because despite what Sherlock might have you believe, Mycroft really does care very deeply for his brother.


	28. Chapter 28

John and Sherlock, neither of whom have ever had anyone in their life quite like the other, don't keep track of how long they have been in a relationship. After a couple of months each finds it hard to remember when they weren't a couple.

Two days after John moved in, he is sitting over breakfast reading the morning paper. There are detailed stories in each one about the death of the Broken Beer Bottle Killer. There's also articles on each of the dead dealers.

"These articles make it sound like police solved this case."

Sherlock is dissecting a tongue on the other side of the table. "I expect that's how the Scotland Yard Media Unit phrased it on their media releases."

"But it's wrong!"

"Oh, as opposed to all the things the papers report correctly? It's not wrong, John, it's spin." 

"It's wrong. YOU solved the case. Why can't they at least acknowledge that in passing?" 

"Because no one is interested in some well-dressed stranger doing the police's job for them. It  
undermines public confidence and that means the Government would have to undertake some huge inquiries, implement new projects and throw money at a problem that can be just as easily concealed in the first place."

John bites his lip absently. "They don't pay you, do they?"

"I don't want them to pay me. It smacks of corruption and gives lie to the possibility that evidence can be uncovered for money. Any defence barrister with the brains God gave a goat would then be able to provide reasonable doubt on any case I was involved in."

"Do private clients pay you?"

"They pay my expenses. And yes, I have received payment, or payment in kind, for services rendered to private clients." Sherlock is carefully lifting the lingual vein from the tongue. John watches and can see that someone has taught him basic surgery techniques.

"Would you mind if I blogged about it?"

Sherlock looks up. "Do you have a blog? Did your therapist tell you to do that?"

John smiles. "You really are amazing. Yes and yes. At least, I have a website. I've never written anything on it."

"You're free to blog about whatever you wish." Sherlock is scrapping away at small muscle fibres, trying to conceal his satisfaction at being the topic of John's blog.

***

They had in residence together for ten days weeks when it was time for the stitches to come

out.

 

Sherlock lays on the couch and John kneels over him, cutting the treads carefully with new

sharp scissors.

"Okay," John says when they're all gone, "You can have a good scratch."

But Sherlock sits up suddenly. "Stand up," he says to John. "No, don't say anything , just stand up."

John does what he's told, no idea what's happening until Sherlock starts unfastening his jeans. 

"Right. Right. Stitches won't break now, of course. Right." He takes his breath in sharply when  
he feels the warm damp kisses. Dimly he wonders if Sherlock had been waiting to do this for ten

days or if he only just remembered now. As if he can extract his thoughts through his skin, Sherlock releases John slowly and looks up with a glazed mouth. "I've been waiting for ten days. Now stop thinking and just relax."

"Right," but his voice is already a little off centre, his thoughts skewed as the maddening rhythm builds and everything under his skin turns to hot liquid.

He holds Sherlock's shoulder for balance when he's finishes, gently squeezing the thick muscles there.

John tastes interesting. Body temperature being a constant, the sluggish fluid is difficult to feel in his mouth but the slightly bitter aroma saturates his palette and Sherlock takes a second to memorise that odd Watson flavour before swallowing extravagantly for John's benefit.

Then he smiles at John with languid satisfaction. "Now might be a good time to get me a beer."

***

I've got two psoriatic corpses if you're interested.  
Molly

Do either have crumbly nails?  
SH

One does. The other has interesting lesions in the throat, nasal and aural canals.  
Molly

Excellent. Can I take portions if they prove interesting?  
SH

Yes. Both are donations.  
Molly

I'll be there this afternoon with a colleague.  
SH

***

After three weeks and two small cases, Sherlock asked John if he'd like to come down to St  
Barts to look at two interesting bodies.

"Will you bring home another head?" John tries to say this casually but Sherlock can detect tiny creaks in his voice.

"Only if they're fascinating and I'm certain they'll fit in the fridge. Do you like psoriasis, John? I love it. I particularly like the lesions that present with plantar psoriasis. You much have seen a lot amongst your troops. It would be a hard thing to manage in the heat, and especially with so much stress. I find it invaluable at crime scenes. I've seen two people convicted partly on the evidence I provided when I found minute flakes at the crime scene."

John nods. He was a little indifferent to psoriasis - there are other more compelling cutaneous diseases in his opinion - but by the time they've reached St Barts, Sherlock has more or less converted him.

John smiles to himself as Sherlock sweeps into the lab where he had worked as a student and a registrar.

"John Watson!" says a soft, slightly rotund bespectacled man perched on a stool in front of a range of slides.

John has no idea who he is. He smiles in his benign way, hoping for clues. 

"Stamford! Mike Stamford! We trained here together!"

"Oh! Yes, Mike, of course. Good to see you." John extends his hand and Stamford shakes it enthusiastically. "Are you working here?"

"I'm teaching third and fourth year pathology. All bright young things, just like we were. I hate 'em. I heard you were in some foreign country being shot at. How'd that work out?"

"I got shot. I'm okay now, though."

A tall girl with beautiful eyes, a kind smile and a bright brown ponytail walks past them.. She nods with shy courtesy at John and makes her way to Sherlock, who is looking at some new petrie dishes. They're a little wider than the old ones, and have slightly raised edges to stop spillage.

"Molly. Why do you have new petrie dishes?"

She sort of sniggers a little nervously. "The old ones kept cracking under extreme cold. They ruined some of Mike's experiments, didn't they Mike? These ones are the better ones from Germany."

Sherlock clasps the dish in his hand. He's about to steal it. "Interesting. Now where are my flaky corpses?"

"I'll take you. Did you bring your colleague?"

"Ah yes. Molly, this is Doctor John Watson, John, this is Molly, who as far as I'm concerned runs St Barts."

Molly, who is now blushing, is infinitely relieved to see that Doctor Watson is not a woman.  
But when she turns and sees Sherlock's face, her disappointment is renewed. 

"Nice to meet you, Doctor Watson."

"Hello Doctor Hooper. You've got some psoriasis for Sherlock, I hear."

She makes that little half snigger again. "Well, I know he loves skin diseases, so I keep a look out for him. One of these has particularly corroded fingernails."

"Brilliant! I can't wait. Coming John?"

"Of course. Good to see you, Stamford."

Stamford raises his fatty, pink hand in a friendly wave.

They follow Molly down to the morgue. Sherlock talks as he takes long strides.

"I asked that idiot Stamford a year ago if he knew anybody who might want to share the flat with me. He's been keeping you a secret all this time. I'm going to poison him slowly."

"You're not poisoning anyone. I haven't seen him for fifteen years. Even if he'd asked me, I'd never would have agreed to meet anyone he thought I should live with."

Sherlock finds the psoriasis corpses very brilliant indeed and takes all the fingernails and toe nails he can fit in two specimen bags. John waits patiently, looking casually at the more severe lesions on the older corpse's hand while Sherlock scraps the scalp and trims large scarlet patches from both thighs. 

Molly makes absent chit chat with Sherlock, but takes special note of the way he looks at John.  
He looks happy, she realises, more happy than she's ever seen him.  
It's nice that he's happy, she assures herself sadly.

***

They had been a couple for a month and one week when John finally started to grasp the full extent of Sherlock's extraordinary gifts.

On a bleak Sunday Sherlock had actually gone to do some shopping with John and noticed

a) how John stopped for a second in front of the rows of cat food and  
b) how John stopped and glanced at the cover of a magazine that featured a woman holding a kitten.

Triggers, thought Sherlock. Let's see how this progresses.

The following morning Sherlock was examining weakness in tooth enamel on teeth he was plucking from a disembodied jaw. No argument could be made to prove he didn't get maximum benefit from his severed head.

Sherlock watches John as he prepares breakfast, chats idly about teeth and stacks the used

breakfast dishes in the sink.

"I'm going to pop out for an hour or two," he says casually. 

"Any where interesting?"

"No, just going to pick up a couple of text books." Recently he has been musing on finding a part time job in a clinic or maybe in an E&A room. He needs to brush up on a couple of areas of pain management and more recent x ray diagnostics.

Good excuse, Sherlock notes.

"Do you need me to pick any thing up for you?" 

Sherlock shakes his head.

"Okay. I'll see you later."

As soon as he hears the front door close, Sherlock bolts to his room for a ninety second shower. He dresses carefully in a navy blue Paul Smith suit and organises his curls with a Kent comb.

He's just about to leave when he checks his pockets and realises he hasn't got Lestrade's warrant card.

John travels by tube and takes the last ten minutes of his journey by foot. When he arrives at the hospital he finds Sherlock, who had read all the messages on John's phone weeks ago, already waiting for him with a nurse in the main foyer.

"Ah, Doctor Watson. I was just telling Matron about your work."

"Splendid." John, wondered how hard it will be to catch on with what ever it Sherlock has claimed he has done.

Matron makes it easy, "Detective Inspector Lestrade tells me you've placed a lot of therapy cats."

"I have, yes."

"Well, I think you'll both be very happy to see how Rhonda has settled in."

They walk down a series of wide, quiet corridors. A few patients are up and about, walking slowly on frames or being pushed in wheelchairs. Others are in rooms sitting around a television or staring at the world they once knew slipping away through slightly streaked windows.

"We've got Rhonda working with some of Alzheimer patients. We find that they remember pets of their own when she's with them, and of course some actually think she is a pet they knew once."

Sherlock listens carefully. "Are any of the Alzheimer patients distressed by a cat?"

"No," Matron says. We've had three therapy cats since I've been here and I've never heard that any of the patients have been distressed or hostile in any way to the them. Through here, now, the next room on your left."

They've followed her through to a wing on the eastern side of the building, They can hear an occasional cry or moan and some aimless conversations. The sounds are distant, the voices are weak.

"We're going to see Ida. She's been here nearly two years." 

"Is she lucid?" Sherlock asks.

"Yes, quite bright, but frail and completely detached from her present situation. Most of her conversation is based around people and events from about 1970. Have you met any people with Alzheimer's before?"

John nods. "I did three months of geriatrics when I was registrar."

Sherlock has read a lot of the research but doesn't disclose this. "Only briefly, on cases," is all he says.

"Hello Ida," Matron says when they enter her room.

The old lady is laying in her bed with a halo of bright white hair and a soft old nightie covered with little springs of pink blossoms. She just smiles at the nurse, doesn't seem to notice John but is immediately taken with Sherlock.

"Lenny!" she says in her worn old voice, her face lighting up slowly. 

"Hello Mrs Fenelly," he says in his kindest voice.

And at her feet, a large champagne cat in a red floral collar with a pretty gold tag stands up and yowls at John. Captain! So good to see you! Look at you! You've got better! You'd love it here. There's meat and gravy every night and we watch movies with the heater on and I can sleep any where I like. This week I'm with Ida but she's out of her tree and keeps calling me Margot. I love it here but I miss you!

"Hello mate," John says quietly as he strokes the soft coat. She's grown thicker and softer, signs that she's getting good food and regular brushing. He feels the collar - it's handmade from scraps of liberty fabric and her name tag has been hand forged.

"You look smart in your new collar." John turns to Matron. "Did someone make this?"

Matron leans over to pat Rhonda too. "Oh yes, those kinds of things are very popular projects.  
One of our patients was a blacksmith - he made the name disc." 

Sherlock is conducting an fascinating conversation with Ida. 

"The street hasn't been the same since you left."

"I'm still there! And Lenny, tell me, did the council ever come and do something about the phone box?"

"They removed it, Mrs Fenelly. It was vandalised so many times, it worked out cheaper to just re-locate it near the library."

He catches John's eye and smiles. "We should get going," John tells him. 

"I have to go, Mrs Fenelly. You take care now."

"Bye bye, Lenny. I'm so glad to see you're out of prison." 

"It's good to be a free man, Mrs Fenelly. Good bye now." 

John scratches Rhonda's chin one last time.

"Bye Rhonda. I'm glad it all worked out for you."

She rubs her head against his hand and closes her bright lime eyes for a second. It's nice to see old friends. She watches as they go, and John turns around briefly for one last look. Bye Captain! Thanks for dropping by! Bye Lenny! Look after the Captain!

Matron walks them back to the foyer. "I trust you're happy with Rhonda's placement here?"

Sherlock launches back in to the preposterous character he becomes when he's passing himself off as Lestrade.

"I'm entirely satisfied, Matron, and thank you for your time this morning. It's been most beneficial. Doctor Watson, do you have any comments?"

He looks up at Sherlock and exercises every last shred of effort not to burst out laughing. 

"No, I'm very pleased with everything. Thank you."

When they walk out side the sun has split the clouds and they can feel the tiny warm rays on their faces. John waits until they've locked the gate behind them and stands still.

Sherlock has his hands behind his back and regards John carefully.

"I find degenerative brain diseases endlessly absorbing. Some hospitals are actually working with Alzheimer's patients to create surroundings that are familiar to them - that is, entering their world instead of struggling to keep them in ours. Interesting how easy it was talk to poor Ida when I entered her world."

"Yes, she really took to you. Or rather to Lenny. I wonder why he's in prison?"

"Theft is my bet. Usually the shortest prison sentences are for theft." 

How did you know about the phone box?"

"Have you ever seen a phone box that wasn't vandalised." 

John shakes his head.

Sherlock hopes he is being amazing.

"I just don't - you are absolutely amazing. How could you have possibly - there is no way you could have seen anything that - Jesus!" John shakes his head again and smiles before looking up to him. "How on earth did you know I was going here?"

"Too easy." And Sherlock explains the cat clues.

"So, do you feel better now?"

"I do. I'm glad she's being looked after."

"You sure you don't want me to go back and confiscate her?"

"No. I mean, I like her, and she was a great cat, and I know you'd like to but no. I couldn't do that to Ida."

"Ida wouldn't haven't a clue, God bless her heart. Still, as you wish." 

"Maybe when we retire. We can get a cat then."

It slipped out. John squeezes his eyes shut in embarrassment, which Sherlock finds secretly adorable.

"Bengals," Sherlock says as he scans the road for a cab. "I particularly like Bengals. They have nice markings. And I should like an Airedale too. Excellent snouts."

John nods silently, a little surprised, a little relieved.

Sherlock hails a taxi down on Archway Road. "We're going to the Porchester," he tells the driver.

"Are we?" says John.

"Yes. We both need a scrub."

John's entirely unsure but a couple of hours later, scrubbed and oiled and massaged from neck to toes, he understands how much he really did need a scrub.

When they get home the flat is dark and they don't speak, just push into each other's arms without a word and kiss deeply. Sherlock steps back, raises his eyebrows slightly and John nods with the smallest smile, follows Sherlock to his room and they leave their clothes in small heaps around the floor. Sherlock sits on the edge of his unmade bed, his lips parted and his breath already shallow while John runs his fingers along the small pleats that form on his lean belly. Then John kneels over him, so Sherlock inches back and they kiss like that, John on his lap, Sherlock's arms wound around him, pulling him in as close, both still scented with sandalwood and amber.

Their bodies still slightly slippery from the oils. John rubs their cocks together and they come fast, breathing thick breath into one another's mouth, heavy eyed and overwhelmed at how close they feel. It doesn't seem right, Sherlock thinks, it seems impossible that one person can make you feel so much.

Afterwards he lays under John's chin and taps his finger over his scar, visualising it as a relief map as he memorises the peninsulas on the east and west side. John closes his eyes and rubs his cheek against the thick dark hair that smells of cold air and formaldehyde and coconut. I love you, they both think, I love you really hard and really strong, but they don't say it yet. Instead Sherlock says they should do this every Monday afternoon, spa and sex and snooze, and John smiles and says sign me up and as he holds him a little closer he realises, this is what getting better feels like.

***

They have been in residence together for nearly three months. During that time they had invited

to consult on nineteen cases, solved fourteen of them, argued seven times, argued seriously once and made up with mutual apologies once. Sherlock had eaten seventeen full meals, picked at things like biscuits thirty one times and slept a total of fifty nine hours.

John has slept in his room a total of three times. These days he curls up in Sherlock's bed who, if he is actually in bed, likes to monitor his breathing, scour his skin with his magnifying glass or they devour one another until their mouths and bodies ache.

They feel very familiar with one another and very comfortable.

On this dull Tuesday morning a very glamorous older woman holding a box from a local patisserie, accompanied by an unbelievable wild-haired older man who clutched a mobile phone, stood at their front door.

"Hello. Is Sherlock home?" asked the older woman. 

John assumed they were clients.

"He is. He's in the shower but won't be long. Please come in." 

He ushered them to the sitting room and sat them both down.

The old man smiled at bullet holes that scarred the wall. "Ambush," he said happily.

"Yes, we had a bit of a mishap there. Can I get you get a cup of tea or coffee while you wait?"

The older lady is gracious. I would love a cup of tea and I know my husband would too. Both with milk and sugar, please."

"Of course." And John remembers his manners. "I'm sorry, I didn't introduce myself. I'm John Watson. I work with Sherlock on his cases."

"I know.' The older lady extends her hand. "I'm Amarita Crisp."

John recognises the name immediately. Amarita is, of course., legendary amongst any doctor who has trained in London in the last thirty years. "Professor Crisp!" he says excitedly. "You were one of my examiners in third year for general cardiology!"

Amarita smiles. "Did you pass?" 

"I did, first time."

"Well you must have good - I fail just about everyone first time around."  
John is just about to speak to the old man - who is engrossed with his phone - when Sherlock almost runs up the hall, hurriedly tying his gown closed. Little crystals of water fly from his hair; John can smell the classy scent of his soap on his freshly washed skin.

"Hello Mummy!" His excitement is almost impossible to contain. His mother has never visited him anywhere. "Papa!"

"Darling, Mycroft said you had a friend! We came immediately to see if he was telling the truth."

***

After they're gone, John asks about Papa. Sherlock is lying on the couch, texting. 

"Your dad doesn't talk much."

"No."

"And he plays scrabble on his phone." 

"Yes."

"Like Mycroft's assistant."

Sherlock smacks his lips. "With Mycroft's assistant." 

"Your dad and Mycroft's assistant play scrabble?"

"Amongst other things. They have conversations too. It's her job." 

John is more confused.

"I don't understand."

"It doesn't matter. He's happy. You're happy. Anthea or whatever she calls herself this week is happy. I'm texting Mycroft that Mummy came to visit with cake and he missed out so I'm very happy. Why are you getting worked up over this?"

"I'm not worked up. I just don't get it."

Sherlock is about to explain Papa when they hear heavy leaps up the stairs outside. John opens the door to Lestrade.

"Hello, Greg!"

"Hi John, is he in?"

"Detective Inspector. How lovely to see you."

"I haven't got time , Sherlock. Remember the Ford family?" 

Sherlock springs to his feet. "Don't tell me they've found them."

"All four of them. In the neighbour's wall. With two mallets. And a blood soaked towel." 

"Who are the Ford family?" John wonders.

"Car's downstairs."

"We'll follow you in a cab."

He waits for Lestrade to leave before grabbing John ecstatically. "What a day! Mummy visits, brings cake, doesn't invite Mycroft and then there's an unsolved quadruple homicide with the evidence all preserved in a wall! It's things like this that remind me how much I love you! Grab your coat."

John grabs his coat, a little dazed, because it's the first time Sherlock has stated his feelings so clearly.

"I love you too," John calls out after him as he follows him down the stairs.

*** 

Five moths after they met, John, whose savings are running low, takes a part time job in the Accident and Emergency rooms at Dick Whittington hospital.

Sherlock is silent, folded up on the couch, face turned away from John. 

"It's only three days a week."

Nothing.

"I'm on probation. They might decide not to keep me after my first day." 

Nothing.  
"I might hate it and leave anyway." 

Nothing.

"I'm not interested in anyone else. I won't be snogging the anesthetist in the supply cupboard or flirting with nurses.

The hostile shape of Sherlock shifts a little. 

"And if interferes with the cases I'll just quit."

Sherlock reaches back and awkwardly pulls John over to lay beside him. It's not comfortable, but sometimes, John figures, you have to make allowances and adjustments to be together.

***

They had been living together for six months when John's blog started to accumulate a regular readership. Sherlock is dismissive, waves his hands around, despairs that anyone would take it seriously.

John, who is typing away, discretely removes a sentence describing Sherlock's lack of understanding about the solar system and instead reminds his readers to follow the link to Sherlock's website.

A few days later Sherlock is beaming at his laptop, his face illuminated by the glow of the screen.

John sets a mug of tea before him.

"Look! I've had a wave of people come in to read my analysis of tobacco ash!" 

"Well, I'm not surprised. It's fascinating."

"Do you think?"

The earnest face, the almost childish anticipation for approval cracks the surface of John's heart.

"Of course. All those people can't be wrong."

***

Eight months after John had settled in to Baker Street, Sherlock, who had been wandering around John's trees in his mind palace, asked him when he first realised when he might like him.

John doesn't have to think. "When you pick pocketed me while I was stitching your face, the first night I met you."

Sherlock smiles and pins that to one of the trees.

***

Sherlock, who right about now would be flinging himself off the top of St Barts if John walked through the park two years ago, has been responsible for a lot of things happening to John.

John is endlessly grateful to Sherlock everything that happens to them every day - for his unrelenting pursuit of danger, his phenomenal mind, his ferocious intelligence and the delectable little streaks of tenderness that make themselves known when John least expects it.

So almost a year after they met, John is sitting on the floor reading Catch 22, which he is enjoying enormously, leaning back against Sherlock, who is armed with a pair of sharp tweezers (stolen especially for him from the supply cupboard by John as a surprise) and extracting hairs from John's left arm one by one.

He needs 75. Each thin golden thread is placed carefully in one of Sherlock's stolen petrie dishes.

Every time he plucks, John says, "Ow."

"Are you going to yelp every time I pluck a hair?" 

"Yes."

"It's annoying. Shut up."

John slaps down his book. "Give me the tweezers." 

"It's quicker if I do it" -  
"Give me the tweezers."

"Fine. Have the tweezers." He whacks them into John's open hand.

John twists a little, grabs Sherlock arm, roughly pushes up his sleeve and plucks one of the bear brown hairs there.

"OW!" says Sherlock. 

"See? It frigging hurts."

"FRIGGING hurts? Frigging? Where's that from?" 

"Shut up. It's a good word."

The glare at one another for a couple of seconds. It's not a stand off, but a little competition to see who breaks first.

Usually it's John, but today it's Sherlock who smirks, starting at his eyes which crinkle and shine, then his cheeks which pucker slightly and then his mouth, which turns up at the corners despite every effort employed to hold it still.

"I win!" John says in the softest voice.

"You've won nothing, Watson" Sherlock huffs, but John can hear the smile in his voice and the

shadow of his lips barely touching his face for a second. "Now sit still and if you must wail, do it quietly."

John doesn't move. He holds Sherlock's gaze.

"Now what? Turn around. I've got another thirty six to pluck." When John doesn't move, Sherlock gets impatient. "What?"

Everything, thinks John, everything. It comes to him every so often when he least expects it. It's too many things to put into words and too many wonderful things for one person in one life time. Some times he feels like his heart is too full.

Sherlock feels the intention and softens his stance, leans his face a little closer. "What?"

"I used to complain to my therapist that nothing ever happens to me."

Sherlock tips his face a little to the side. The scar has almost disappeared and his eyes change colour like opals.

"So what are you saying? Do you want to go back to therapy and tell her that now too much happens to you?"

John shakes his heads, laughing a little.

"No. I just wanted to tell you that you're the best thing that ever happened to me."

 

~~fin~~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have some excellent news! @ancientreader has written a sequel to this story, and it is phenomenal. I am very, very hopeful that she will post it, because it is fabulous piece of writing, and it provides a very happy ending for another character in this story.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Thing with Feathers](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11063925) by [ancientreader](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancientreader/pseuds/ancientreader)




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